How to replace a Tile Slim battery

My Tile Slim server for 2 years and then stopped. As expected.

Am I ready to buy a 38CHF new one? Hell no.

So this is…

How to replace a Tile Slim battery

Open the Tile Slim and you will find a the squared battery wrapped around a tiny aluminium foil.

The round on the left is the speaker, not the battery.

Detach the battery from the circuits

Help yourself with scissors and remove the plastic

Take a CR1620 battery.

It’s a 3V battery and is the slimmest you can find.

Hel yourself with a scalpel and remove the plastic form the two connectors.

Clean it as much as you can as later on the welding phase you don’t want the plastic to melt into the connector.

Take the slimmest cable you have at home

Ready to weld.

In this phase I had to repeat the welding as the plastic was melting. You need to have manual skils.

The result should look like this:

Now don’t do like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkegsGM97Yw

You should never, ever, weld a battery. It can definitely explode on your face. Just use tape!

The negative is the below connector and the positive is the upper one.

The result should look like this:

Wrap it up.

I had to open it again as the speaker was not working. It wasn’t working because the connector to the speaker was not touching the speaker. I put a piece of paper to fill the pace and it was ok. This is the result:

Conclusion

The whole process took 30 minutes.

The Tile Slim now works and I didn’t spend the 38CHF.

Manual works like this give me the time to think. 30 years ago no one would have ever created a product like this, without rechargeable batteries. So why Tile didn’t want you to replace the battery? Because they want you to buy a new one every 2 years.

This creates two problems.

First problem: no standards

I was born in 1984 and when I was young big corporations where cooperating to create standards.

This allowed you to swap batteries from the remote of your TV to your toys.

Standards created this World:

I have the feeling that that World doesn’t exist any more.

Companies are at an economic wat to one each other and as result who is paying… is us. 

We have already seen this in the war of phone cables. Thanks god the European Union (which I usually blame) forced phone manufacturers to follow a standard to reduce the endless garbage that phone cables were producing.

If I think back to my first phones Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, etc… allowed you to replace their own batteries and it was a miracle: you could just swap the battery, restart the phone, and you were good to go. Today is impossible to imagine a World like that. Oh, I would love to have the ability to swap my phone battery!

The standards are getting removed on every corner of our society.

Think about Linux: you can install it on any PC but you cannot install it on a phone. Why?

Because PCs are following the Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) that was created by PowerPC.

In the other hand phones have:

• Different bootloader: …and you already stop your installation there
• Different hardware: Even two Android phones can have different chips, drivers, and peripherals — no uniform way to talk to the hardware.
• No Generic Drivers: Linux needs drivers for display, touch, Wi-Fi, etc., and these are often closed-source and specific to each phone.

We are in an economic war and as in all wars citizens pay the price.

Second problem: no recycling

I drop you two numbers that will make you understand where the problem is:

• 99% of the car batteries are recycled (they have a standard)
• 99% of the phone batteries aren’t recycled (they don’t have a standard)

This is a massive problem.

If batteries follows a standard like AAA or AA it’s easy to automate a recycling line.

But if Apple, Samsung, Huawei, etc.. they all have different batteries there is no way you can automate the recycling.

And is not only about phones. Today you can find batteries: in your kids’ shoes, ski goggles, ski gloves, your wallet and keys (this article is an example)… and they are all different. All those minerals will never be recycled! And they will pollute!

All this to increase the wallet of companies that sell those items. They don’t want you to recycle, they want you to buy a new one!

At this rate landfills will be the next  lithium mine and it’s sad because we could have avoid this.

My Solution for now

I asked ChatGPT for alternatives and I will give a try to one of those:

✅ Tile Slim Alternatives (Rechargeable + iOS & Android Compatible)

1. Pebblebee Card Universal

   • 🔋 Rechargeable (18 months per charge)

   • 📱 Works with Apple Find My and Google Find My Device

   • 🔊 Loud alert, IPX6 water resistant

   • 💳 Slim (2.8mm), fits in wallet

   • 💰 ~€35

2. Cube Shadow

   • 🔋 Rechargeable via USB (2 months per charge)

   • 📱 Compatible with iOS and Android

   • 🔊 100dB alert, IP67 waterproof

   • 🪶 Ultra-thin design

   • 💰 ~€36

3. Orbit Card

   • 🔋 Rechargeable

   • 📱 Compatible with iOS and Android

   • 💳 Credit card size

   • 💰 ~€30–35