The Essential Phone from Andy Rubin's startup was considered by many as a game-changer. Smartphone experts felt that the handset from the Android co-creator's company would set a new benchmark in the markets and would directly challenge other Android-powered smartphone makers, such as Samsung and LG. However, ever since its launch, Essential Phone's production, and ultimate release has been fraught with a series of problems. After releasing the handset nearly three months later than what was promised, the Essential Phone has since received mixed reviews.
The folks at Ifixit recently performed a teardown of the handset to see how repairable the $700 flagship smartphone is. The results were not that good.
What did the teardown reveal?
iFixit is a well-known website which opens up new smartphones and devices to check and see how easy or difficult it would be to repair that device if it gets damaged for some reason. The website scores on a scale of one to 10 and in that scale, the Essential Phone has scored just 1. The folks at iFixit claimed that this essentially means that the smartphone in question is pretty much impossible to repair if it gets damaged.
They revealed that opening up the smartphone is so difficult that it may cause more harm than good.
This is due to the fact that copious amounts of adhesive are used to ensure that everything remains in place. The team had to first freeze the device with super-cold aerosol. Then they reheated the handset, to ensure that the adhesive holding the back panel in place would come apart.
However, the team discovered that getting into the handset this way would cause a lot of damage to the internals.
So, they started a different method of opening up the Essential Phone. This time around, they tried going in through the front panel. However, this too did not seem to work as the panel cracked, while they tried to open the handset up. The team was unsuccessful in all attempts to get the handset to open by using the conventional mobile repair kits and they had to use specialized tools to finally get it to open.
What did the internals of the handset reveal?
The team at iFixit noticed that the battery in the handset was attached to the other equipment through a stretchable adhesive, which indicated that the battery can be replaced if someone does succeed in getting inside the handset in the first place. Apart from this they also noticed that the USB C port was soldered with the chipset, making it absolutely impossible to replace or repair. In other words, the Essential Phone cannot be repaired by users and is it gets damaged, users will likely have to purchase a brand-new handset.
