Compatible replacement battery for the Pinephone Pro

[tpoacher]

As of the time of writing this post, the official pinephone lithium battery is out of stock.

The wikipage to which the above page redirects to (namely this one) says:

The supplied battery is meant to be compatible with Samsung part number EB-BJ700BBC / BBE / CBE from the 2015 J7 phone. The extended life aftermarket BBU does fit, although it is a tight fit.

Based on the above, I went ahead and purchased a Samsung EB-BJ700CBE battery.
However, this is a REALLY tight fit in the phone. If you wedge it in enough, it fits, but it feels to me like there is a lot of pressure on the battery from the case.
E.g., it is impossible to get the battery out with your nail alone; I had to get a spoon and use it as a lever over the side of the case, to even get the battery to get unstuck enough to pull it out. And when you cram it in, it's so tight you can see part of the covering over the battery 'crinkle' a little bit.

I'm very reluctant to use this battery, despite the fact that I can, in theory, "cram" it in; to me that sounds like a recipe for trouble somehow. Samsung batteries have enough of an 'explosive' reputation even in the absence of undue pressure on the battery as it is ...

Has anyone else had any experience with this battery? Is it safe to use despite the tight fit?
If my worries are not unwarranted, does anyone recommend any other battery which fits a bit more reasonably?
Better yet, is the official Pinephone lithium battery expected to be back in stock anytime soon?

Many thanks

[RuTrainsurfer]

Can you just remove battery's bottom plastic cover? It's just glued as I know.

[biketool]

I am using the Polarcell for Samsung Galaxy J7 for my standard PP.  It is a bit tighter than the stock battery but since the N900 days(post Scud battery) and the battery testing thread(Nokia batteries were junk and often counterfeit) found the Polarcell to be the best towards the end of the ongoing testing.
One issue with the N900 was that improperly sized batteries(double-Scud in a Mugen oversized battery cover) would stress the N900's system board and cause the modem board to become deballed from the system board giving the famous N900 SIM death icon.  I only mention that to show the possible risk of a non-standard battery causing a flexed circuit board in some designs.
I am using the polarcell Samsung sized battery and it has worked well on my PP 1/16gb and my 3/32gb boards, but it is not the stock Pine64 part.

A battery reorting thread would be useful in the Pinephone era as it was in the N900 area as both devices could quickly burn through battery charge.

I hope that once we begin compiling multimedia apps or a hardware abstraction layer for the PP GPU rather than using brute CPU we will get better battery performance

[dchang0]

Can you just remove battery's bottom plastic cover? It's just glued as I know.

Yes, it is quite easy to remove, and the battery fits perfectly once the piece of plastic is removed from the bottom edge of the Samsung battery.
It's only held on with a small amount of glue. The hardest part is that I had to lift the silver adhesive label on both the front and back up a bit at the bottom edge to be able to get to the edge of the black plastic piece and pry it off. That's easy to do without puncturing the battery pack with a plastic guitar pick.