New smartphone labels for battery life and repairability are coming to the EU

The European Union has announced details of new mandatory labels for smartphones and tablets sold in the bloc, which include ratings for energy efficiency, durability, and repairability. Hardware will also have to meet new “ecodesign requirements” to be sold in the EU, including a requirement to make spare parts available for repair.

The labels, which will be required for any devices that go on sale from June 20th onwards, are similar to existing ones for home appliances and TVs. They display the product’s energy efficiency rating, on a scale from A to G, along with battery life, the number of charge cycles the battery is rated for, letter grades for durability and repairability, and any applicable IP rating for protection from dust and water.

Alongside the labels the EU is introducing “ecodesign requirements” imposing minimum standards on the same products. Those include protection from splashes of water (and dust particles larger than 1mm for phones), scratch and drop protection, batteries that retain at least 80 percent of their capacity after 800 charging cycles, and making “critical spare parts” available within 5-10 working days. Manufacturers are also required to provide operating system updates within six months of the source code becoming available — a bar that Samsung would have failed to meet with its recent One UI 7 rollout.

Covered products include smartphones and tablets with screens up to 17.4 inches, along with cordless landline phones and feature phones. Phones with rollable displays are exempted — not that any are on sale yet, though they’re coming — while Windows-based tablets will be covered by a separate scheme for computers.