Yes, this battery is soldered into the radio.

And, of course, Radio Shack stopped selling the replacement battery 
with the pig tails of wire attached to it years ago.

An engineer at work replaced two of them for me about 3 years back.

I took the old battery to Interstate Battery. A technician there 
soldered some leads onto similar sized button batteries for me, 
although technically, I don't think they are suppose to be heated like that.

I have been told that there is enough room inside the HT to install a 
holder for a similar battery, but I have not asked anyone to do that 
for me yet. I will look further into that possibility the next time one 
of the batteries fails.

When the lithium battery dies, you lose the memories each time the 
radio is turned off. Then you get a bunch of beeps and an error message 
each time it is turned on. Additionally, everything about the radio 
resets to its defaults each time as well.

You can make it work, but re-programming even one channel every time 
you want to use it gets old in a hurry.

-- 
Mike Duke, K5XU