The Tech-pert: Buying a Replacement Phone Battery on the Cheap

It's a fact of life: rechargeable batteries wear out over time. And if your cell phone is more than a year or two old, chances are its battery doesn't hold a charge nearly as long as it used to.

So it was with Mrs. Tech-pert's Palm Centro. It needed recharging every single day, and all too often she'd reach into her purse to find a dead phone.

"Let me get you a new battery!" I'd say.

"No, it's too expensive, I can live with it," she'd answer, the sweet little frugalista.

And it would be expensive, too, if we bought it from the usual suspects. Palm charges $39.99 for a new Centro battery, and Sprint's only option is a battery/charger combo for $49.99.

Fortunately, the Tech-pert knows better: When shopping for batteries, always shop online, and always look to smaller resellers. With a little Google searching ("Palm Centro battery"), I found Palm-branded replacement batteries in the $10-15 range. Nice.

But something told me I could do better. And, sure enough, a quick visit to eBay later, I'd ordered a new Centro battery for just $4.40--shipped! No way Mrs. Tech-pert could complain about that price.

Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on what kind of phone you have and what kind of battery it takes. But in my experience you can always get a better battery deal when you shop online.

By the way, if you're an iPhone owner, you probably know that its battery can't be replaced--not easily, anyway. But if you're handy with an X-Acto knife and your iPhone is out of warranty, you can perform a little do-it-yourself surgery and replace an iPhone battery for as little as $6.

Have you ever scored a sweet deal on a phone battery? Or discovered that you paid way too much for one? Tell me about it in the comments!

Self-proclaimed cheapskate Rick Broida has been a technology writer for over 20 years. He has authored over a dozen books, including, most recently, "How to Do Everything: Palm Pre." Currently he writes the Cheapskate blog for CNET, the Hassle-Free PC blog for PC World, and technology stories for Popular Science, Wired, and other magazines.