Is this an authentic Asus battery?

The top one came with my laptop when i bought it used.

I just bought the battery on the bottom from a retail store.

Is the bottom one 100% authentic and made by Asus? I assume Made in Taiwan is in the Asus factory? But there is no Asus name on it.

Are your original batteries like the one on the bottom as well?

 

Asus doesn't produce their own batteries, they buy them from one of the major suppliers in Asia.

Taiwan is one of the places where batteries are produced, and then sold to Asus, Dell, HP, etc, etc.

What you appear to have is an aftermarket OEM battery, produced to the original specs of your S62. As long as it works and reports a full charge, you're good to go. Enjoy.

 

Ironically enough, the top one is not an authentic Asus battery, but the bottom one is.

 

Heh, ironically enough:

http://www.celxpert.com.tw/eng/p2-1-2.asp?num=363
http://www.celxpert.com.tw/eng/p5-1.asp <= ASUS' logo is there.

Looks like they were probably contracted to make the units, then started selling them afterwards with their name on it (more or less what ClearSkies was saying).

BUT, from the picture, it doesn't look like the same type of plastic. Probably made after the initial run with the supposition that people would need more batteries for that style of unit since it was CBB?

 

What is CBB?
Also, I paid cad$80 for the new battery on the bottom. 6 cell
Is that worth it?

 

Well, the Asus estore sells the 6 cell battery for $90 USD and BTOTech has them for $69 USD. So I would say it's about the average price.

 

It stands for "Common Building Block" and means that it's a part of the system designed with the "Verified by Intel" initiative to be more easily replaceable/exchangeable.

 

Yep, and which is now defunct. VBI has been all but dropped at this point since it didn't fly since a) it was more expensive than your average laptop and b) it had so many logistics problems. Great on paper, and the Intel guys made it sound like things would go perfectly, but apparently not quite so.

CBB was intended to reduce the degree of proprietary interfaces and try to make components more common and inter-compatible between manufacturers. This was supposed to be the "advantage" that Intel channel resellers would have over tier 1 OEMs. Unfortunately, not only did it not fly, everyone seemed to conveniently forget that Dell was making their stuff even more customizable and cheaper than Intel was offering to everyone.

The main sell points of these units were that it was customizable and it was higher quality than most of the competition (not by much). But two of the key factors in making a sale are price and service: the after-sale support from resellers was pretty much limited by the extremely disorganized state of the VBI program. Plus add to the fact that two of the major tier 1s (Acer and Dell) were trying to kill each other by selling cheaper and cheaper laptops. Sub-1000$CAD (~850-900$ USD during the time, 'course everything is relative due to location) laptops had been starting to roll out at about that time and it didn't make things any easier.

Let's just say selling barebones of that sort to the average folk with those conditions is difficult if not downright impossible at this point. Enthusiasts might be interested (ex: C90) but that's about it.