Dude, no I live in the UK. How do you know it is a nokia battery? Nokia batteries are hugely ripped off by chinese manufacturers, and it has been a problem for quite some time.

If you buy a nokia battery for $1.50 I can bet you it isn't made by nokia, whatever it says on the label. If you want to cheap out on the battery, it is your choice. I would rather get one from somewhere I can rely on

And no, it isn't the most common. The most common is the BL5C or a BL4C, although my n73 needs a BP6M and wifes E65 needs a BL5F (which incidently is £3 more expensive than the iPod battery at my local shop).

No it isn't. Nokia didn't think about the consumer with the battery. Do you think there were a lot of these batteries before nokia turned up? No, they were their own designs and there are a lot of different designs, to fit the phones. They didn't think of the consumer, they did what the supplier of every portable electronic device does - they get something with the best power they can buy in for the cheapest that fits in the space available. They are cheap now because there are a lot of nokias around, and there are a lot of pirated batteries.

You may like to think there are a lot of evil companies sitting round trying to work out how to make things difficult for people, but they really aren't - they are just all working on compromise of weight/size/power/cost.

I got an iPod charger for my wifes car last week. It cost £4.

If you have a point fine, if you want to just shoot your mouth off because you don't like iPods, fine too, just call it what it is.

I never understood the battery issue. I have had 5 iPods in the house (me and my wife) and never changed (or needed to) the battery. I have had 12 nokias in the house, and I haven't changed the battery on one of those either (and not many of those used the same battery). maybe it is an issue for you - it never has been for me.

The only time a battery was an issue for me was one sony-ericcson that expanded to about 3 times its previous size