China MII Proposes New Cell Phone Battery Standard

Recently there are many incidents of cell phone batteries explosion which eventually triggered the cells manufacturers to start recalling some of their products that are under suspicious batches. Instead of having recalls that consume huge amount of money, it is better to have good preventive measurements to minimize the occurrence. In view of this, China’s Ministry of Information Industry (MII) is coming up with a new proposal to standardize all the cell phone batteries in the country. You may expect that various kinds of funny-shape batteries that we currently hold to be replaced and standardized to only few models across all brands of cell phones in the market, as similar to existing dry-cell batteries.

The primary goal of the standardization is to reduce the occurrence of safety issue due to sub-standard battery cells. With the standardization process, cell phone batteries types may be able to be reduced to 3 or 4 standard sizes only, which could be pro for consumers when looking for a replacement battery and to be shared among few phones’ models. Besides, the manufacturing cost can be reduced significantly due to the mass production of similar batteries with same technology across all manufacturing lines.
Despite those benefits, there are some opposition to this new proposal especially from the original battery manufacturers. Just imagine, they may need to share out the technology secret among themselves and they will no longer own the speciality on the batteries that being sold. Furthermore, the manageability of these IP (Intellectual Properties) could be an obstacle when comes to actual implementation.