Chinese Replacement Batteries, EXPOSED!
You are getting even less than you thought ...
October, 2010
Just the other day, I was staring at the stack of batteries I had for various portable gadgets. One battery in particular - the BP-5L which I use for my Nokia N800 prompted me a thought - why is my old genuine battery working so much better than my relatively young, China made "replacement".
The stock Nokia BP-5L is rated at 1500mAh. The replacement, which I got for a fraction of the price (from a relatively popular and supposedly reputable online dealer, not e-bay) was only 1300mAh. That's only a little bit less, or so you would think - the maths tells me that the 1300mAh is just about 14% less.
In use, I found the 1300mAh battery only gave me 3 to 3.5 hours of usage whereas the old and slightly worn original battery was giving me close to 6 hours. That's quite a large difference. Ignoring all warnings, I proceeded to "disassemble" the battery pack. People who know what a BP-5L looks like would realize the original battery has a nice plastic shell over it that makes it difficult. Lucky for me - the cheapy has only a piece of adhesive label - this peeled back easily to reveal this ...
A battery code for the battery cell! And it's a unique one too - it points to a company called YikLik in China - the specifications are available here. What you'll realize is that it is only factory rated at 1150mAh - not even 1300mAh as on the label, and nowhere close to the 1500mAh that the original Nokia claims to have! Who knows, maybe even this company has already jacked up the label rating ... anyway - 1150mAh is just 76% of the capacity of the original Nokia battery. How dissapointing!
A mitigating factor was just how cheap this battery was - under $20, whereas the original would have cost me about $80! Unfortunately, you can't trust the advertised specs of these copycats to be correct. This isn't an isolated incident ...
Here's another battery, same retailer, quite popular "replacement" going around for the BL-5C, another Nokia battery commonly used in low end Nokia phones and GPS units. Labelled capacity - 1000mAh.
Peeling back the label, no surprise, the unique battery code points to the same cell supplier - YikLik, and this time, they tell us in the specs here that it is only a 900mAh battery. That's a 10% reduction - not too bad, but it's still a lie nonetheless.
Of course, I'm not saying you should not buy these clones - after all - they are the only affordable options. Instead, you should take the rated capacities with a grain of salt, and not be surprised if you're ripped off ...
EDIT: Lets try another example - this time - my Laptop Battery. Another battery from the same "reputable" compatible vendor - $80 for the Toshiba replacement which is claiming 14.4v at 4400mAh. A peer inside shows it uses CGR18650AF Cells from Panasonic (nice!) but they're only 2050mAh each, eight cells configured in a series-parallel configuration only gives 14.4v at 4100mAh not 4400mAh. Scammed again!
