So perhaps there is a design choice here that i’m not seeing, or i think this could be a bug, if others agree it is.
Cellphones (like flip phones) allow one to unload the battery, smartphones like iphones of course are difficult to remove the battery without dissasembly, so that part makes some sense. However, i believe it would make sense to be able to get the battery from a smart phone, unless the battery composition is not amenable to that.
Smart phones are charged from a UPS by default IIRC, so they wouldn’t possess a battery of their own.
EDIT: yeah I just double checked. The description reads as follows:
“A popular, fancy smartphone. Capable of making photos due to integrated camera and illuminating an area as per flashlight app, assuming it has enough charge. The smartphone also has a clock app that includes an alarm. Runs on a small, rechargeable power cell compatible with Unified Power Supply.”
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A cell is just another term for a battery (technically a battery is a collection of cells) but i’m fairly certain smartphones have a much higher mAh capacity than say a flip phone. Perhaps in the future ups is so common, that the batteries are tiny, but that seems odd to me. At the very least they should give ultra light high cap batteries on disassembly. Just because a battery is compatible with UPS doesn’t mean it’s not a battery, hell the recharging station i’m pretty sure is just a UPS with a vehicle power hook up.
In the latest experimental builds where nearly all batteries are rechargeable it really should be possible to remove the battery from a smartphone. The idea of an item being “UPS compatible” has lost some of its meaning with the new battery system.
I’d agree that disassembling a smart phone should give a battery. Real smart phones have standardized batteries in them, they’re just not removable and may be soldered directly onto the circuit board these days. That said, it would seem fair if it took an electronics skill of 3+ to separate the battery from the rest of the phone without damaging it.
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Electronics 3 seems a bit much, while i haven’t personally desoldered a battery from a smart phone, I’d argue relative beginners that have basic understanding of electronics and soldering should be able to desolder a battery. Experts can feel free to weigh in differently of course. (perhaps i’m misunderstanding the experience levels, but i learned how to solder/desolder in less than an hour in college)
I guess I don’t really know where it should fall on the game’s skill levels. I was thinking 3 would be the level where you can always get all of the components from a smartphone. The battery would probably be one of the easier bits to save, but to also get the LCD display and all the circuitry without damaging anything seems quite difficult.
hate to bring it up in some ways (not really), but you made me question an obvious thing: battery volatility, where is it?
if you poke a lithium ion cell like literally any cell phone will certainly be using you’ll get a violent explosion, it’s kinda too easy to just disassemble them and assume it was a safe and sane action and don’t even think about using it without a protective case to prevent it being crushed.
A fair point, there are lots of things in the game that could be dangerous to disassemble and this is one of them. It probably wouldn’t hurt the player or burn down the hideout, but it would definitely destroy the phone and maybe damage your soldering iron.
A lithium battery, while it does produce some gas as a biproduct of the charge/discharge cycle, is hardly going to explode if agitated. Worse case is more or less the heat of the phone plus the volatile lithium+H gas can cause a fire, but i’m fairly certain LiOn batteries are far safer than you think they are.
If you can even determine as a noob, what a battery that is soldered to the board is. Your skill would be around lvl3.
I knew a handful of pc repair guys that didn’t know the difference between a capacitor and the batteries soldered to the boards. But taking that into consideration also means that the battery would have to be some fairly standard when many flat batteries are not standard at all. Well company to company at least. But even so the variety of batteries makes not getting one out of the smart phones kinda makes sense to me.
Worth noting that batteries are pretty heavily regulated and so the batteries in nearly any device are clearly labeled as such. One example of such regulations: https://www.epbaeurope.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/New-battery-marking-guidelines-January-2015.pdf
So even the “non-removable” batteries common in smart phones these days will still look like batteries, even when they are glued and/or soldered in place. The batteries needed to be clearly marked before they could be sold from the battery factory to the phone factory. Just recognizing what is and isn’t a battery should only be Electronics lvl 1 I’d say.
As far as I can tell the only way you’d find unmarked batteries would be if you cracked open equipment so specialized that the batteries were manufactured on-site and integrated directly into the final device. In that case it seems like most of the relevant markings have to be on the device containing the battery instead.
I take it you are smarter than the average bear, such as I. I dig that. 
But I also know how the general populace is as dumb as a door knob. The vast majority of the world are capable of using a cell phone or at least learning how. But many people still have no clue about using such devices(or similar). Let alone cracking one open and understanding how they work.
Ever get on a tech support line before? There is a legitimate reason why they ask questions like; “Is your machine plugged in?”. Seems silly. But…lots of people don’t know to plug stuff in. Seriously.
That’s why most characters start with electronics at 0; most people don’t know much about it. But anybody can learn if they take the time to read up or practice on real devices.
As someone that repairs phones regularly, it should require heat to loosen adhesive or you risk bending too far and piercing the battery or have to spend significantly longer slowly prying with a precision plastic prying tool or guitar pick.
I wouldn’t normally recommend a knife for risk of scraping the thing up, but for pure functionality fine cutting, a scalpel or craft knife cuts through the glue holding things fairly easily and fits in the thin crevices.
It would definitely require I’d say electronics 1 to understand this, one could pre-heat the phone on a stovetop of sorts and wear heat resistant gloves to pry the glass and glue sandwiches apart with a thin tool, a knife would do the job honestly so fine cutting plus heat plus a soldering iron?
I use a flat head screw driver and even while being careful tends to mar the seal brim. The plastic in most phone devices happen to be pretty cheesy even in expensive phones. I don’t do often enough though to warrant a pick-key that slides easier through them. Normally fixing a family member problem device and they hardly care.
Though PC repair with laptops isn’t far off when I worked as a bench technician.