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I've noticed your iPhone battery is running flat, could I interest you in a battery case?

Just get a battery boost pack. Mophie (and others im sure) are already announcing their products for these new samsung phones.

Battery cases are like having a broken leg but instead of going to get a cast you get a pair of crutches and call it a day.
Never mind that your battery is too weak or that you have a broken leg, crutches FTW!

as for thinness, I dont want that! Gimme a phone 2x as thick as current top tier phones (or about 1/2 as thick as old nokia candy bar phones) and give me 4X the battery life. I want some heft in my phone. not zach morris phone thick, but old candy bar phone thick

Just get a battery boost pack. Mophie (and others im sure) are already announcing their products for these new samsung phones.

Or you know you could just turn those features that suck power off. When I'm abroad I usually turn off data transfer, if I also don't use it for games or the GPS tracker or any of the other power hungry uses and limit it to being a call/text only dumb phone then it lasts ages on a single charge. And if that's still not enough, get a Powerstation XL and plug it in when and where you do sleep.

A piece of hardware where you can't swap out the battery or facilitate easy repairs is an affront to the consumer.

No, a piece of hardware where you can't swap out the battery or facilitate easy repairs is exactly what the vast majority of consumers have been demanding for years, and voting for with their dollars.

Don't confuse the things YOU want with "stuff that everybody must want."

Why do you have a fetish for a "swappable" battery? I have an iPhone, and a mophie powerstation which provides me about 2.6x the charge of a standard internal iPhone battery, and can also power any other device I own which uses a USB charger - instead of multiple swappable battery packs, I have a single external battery pack that can power multiple devices, and frankly, I prefer this to multiple batteries knocking around in my bag, with special charger adapters for each one, and having to keep track of which is charged and which isn't.

As far as "repairable" - the vast majority of people who need computer repairs will bring them to a repair service (Apple, third party, Dell, or otherwise) for service, anyway - so it does not matter to them whether or not consumers can "easily service" the system. you're paying a bunch of money for someone else to repair it - the Apple designs aren't going to cost you that much more for the repair - if it takes 10 minutes to swap the part, or 17 minutes to swap the part, you're still paying for an hour of labor.

So stop crying, chum. If you want to repair your own hardware, you're in the overwhelming minority. Buy accordingly.

If you're going to go to the expense & trouble of carrying around a spare battery, then go buy a mophie powerstation or similar, and voila: 2nd charged battery in your bag in the event you use it heavily and drained it in the middle of the day.

If you're carrying around phone + spare battery, does it *REALLY* matter to you that the battery doesn't go INSIDE the phone, with the replaced (discharged) battery banging around loose in your bag instead? Get a Powerstation for $59.95, and at full charge, it provides 2500 mAh of power; The iPhone 4S has an internal 1430 mAh battery, so it's NEARLY the equivalent of 2x the internal capacity, meaning you'd have the equivalent of 2.75 full charges to run on.

Bonus: The Mophie powerstation, (at least - I suspect other models will work similarly, but the powerstation is the only one I own), will also power any other device that charges over a USB cable. I've used it to dump a charge into a point-and-shoot camera, an iPod, and a Blackberry, as well as an iPhone. Better than carrying spare batteries for all those devices, no?

It's like people don't realize these options exist, or that the options are functionally identical to "carrying around an extra battery." You can either carry around Phone + extra battery, and swap it in and out, or you can carry around Phone + extra batter, and simply plug the extra battery into your phone when it's getting low.

Smartphones are built pretty tough actually, and there are tons of wonderful 3rd party cases that can make iPhones pretty indestructible.

I think a charger + case all-in-one would be the best bet, similar to the mophie juice pack air because swapping batteries out of a phone while on the battlefield doesn't sound like such a hot idea to me. No smartphone has a long enough battery life anyway, so a second battery in a case would probably be best, and maybe the case could have a easily swappable battery. Sure Mophie could make something suitable if you were ordering 100,000+ from them.