Have you noticed that the back of your smartphone won’t stay on? The battery door no longer latches? The problem may be as simple as an old battery that has began to bulge. If it’s been a year or two since you bought your phone, it’s likely that you need a new battery.

Modern Smartphones can burn through all the energy stored in their LiIon batteries in only a few hours of GPS map viewing, YouTube Downloading, Web Browsing activity. And LiIon batteries will start to degrade over time and multiple charge/discharge cycles. The typical LiIon battery is at only 50% of it’s rated capacity 18 months after it is manufactured. This means that your SmartPhone will run it down twice as fast. The faster you discharge these batteries the more likely they are to physically deform.

The photos below show two identical HTC Aria batteries. The battery on the left is two years older than the battery on the right, and has been used daily in the phone. As you can see, at the end of it’s life, the battery in the left has deformed so badly that it would no longer fit in the phone.