The New Hotness

Having an ancient flip phone in need of a battery, I ordered a Kyocera TXBAT10133 battery from eBay. Described as “new” (which, according to the Ebay listing, means “New: A brand-new, unused, unopened, undamaged item in its original packaging”), I was somewhat surprised to see this emerging from the box:

It obviously led a rather hard life before being harvested from somebody else’s obsolete flip phone and is definitely not “new”.

Not yet having a deep emotional attachment to the thing, I set it up for a capacity test:

Given a very light 100 mA load, it shows about the same capacity as the original battery in our phone:

Given the precarious contact arrangement, the glitches near the right end aren’t surprising.

The battery label claims a 900 mA·h rating, so both have nearly their nominal capacity at such a reduced load. In actual use, the phone has a low battery after a few hours of power-on time, far less than when it was new.

The seller promises a replacement. For all I know, there are no genuinely “new” batteries available for these phones.