[robotjosh]

I bought a phone battery on amazon. Looked legit, was the top result for my phone. It was counterfeit and wouldn't work. I don't even know how to get a battery because the phone stores didn't have it anymore. Can't trust amazon.

[jlarocco]

That's scary. Yesterday the building across the street from us nearly burned down due to a lithium ion battery catching fire. Fortunately, it looks like the damage was limited to a couple rooms of a single office, and the firefighters put it out quick.

It was a good reminder that lithium ion batteries are dangerous. Not sure I'd trust buying them on Amazon.

[ArtDev]

Same thing happened to me.

The funny thing is that the Samsung website sends you an Amazon seller.

I noticed this the second time I needed a battery. The batteries look identical. The only difference was that the counterfeit battery only lasted a couple months.

[rwmj]

While I agree that buying phone batteries is a lottery on Amazon, in this case you might have got a genuine battery which had simply been in storage for a long time (which applies to batteries for any phone that's out of production).

Li-Ion batteries won't necessarily work after being stored unless they were charged to a specific level and stored in a very specific way. And you have to go back and check the charge and maybe recharge them regularly. More in this article:

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_store_batt...

Needless to say none of this would have happened if it was sitting on a shelf in some warehouse for 3 years.

[mschuster91]

Now here's some piece of legislation that could e.g. be made part of "right to repair" bills:

When a product with batteries gets EOL'd and uses non-standard (e.g. AA/AAA, CRxxxx coin cells, 18650 Li-Ion) cells and/or proprietary controller chips, the specifications (mechanical, electrical and EC firmware source) must be made public.

To ensure that this gets followed and e.g. devices from insolvent manufacturers don't end up without reasonable possibility of new batteries, any manufacturer / importer of any device into the country must deposit said information at a public library/archive, similar to FCC/CE certification records.

[robotjosh]

Mine actually was counterfeit. I could tell because the phone comes up with the message "please replace your unauthorized battery with a genuine battery" and the phone wouldn't work. My phone is at that point where it starts working slow for no reason despite all the free memory. I've been using samsung phones since 2005 but now I'm never getting another samsung.

[OneOneOneOne]

Try ebay. They seem to take negative feedback more seriously.

[Arizhel]

I've bought several batteries for Samsung phones from Ebay. Look for "Samsung OEM" and find a seller in the US. Check the feedback. I can't guarantee it won't be counterfeit, but it's a better bet than Amazon.

[greenyoda]

I've bought cell phone batteries from batteries.com. I haven't gotten anything from them in years, so my experience isn't current, but they had the batteries I needed and they worked OK.