Andy Rubin’s Essential Phone finally started shipping a couple of weeks back after missing the company’s own initial release deadline. If you’re one of the people who picked up this handset, you might want to take extra care of this device because you woudn’t want to end up in a situation where it needs to be repaired. That’s because the teardown experts at iFixit have branded the Essential Phone as a “hot mess.”
The folks at iFixit tore down the Essential Phone recently and found that it’s quite difficult to repair. The handset scored a 1 out of 10 on iFixit’s repairability scale. Essential Phone has thus scored a place on the list of devices that are the most difficult to repair.
“Any attempt at repair is likely to inflict as much damage as it fixes,” iFixit notes in its teardown. As I said, you’d not want to be in a position where you have to get your Essential Phone repaired.
They found that none of the internals were accessible by opening the back of the phone. The screen actually had to be frozen and cracked just to gain access to the internal components.
Even the USB Type-C port is very difficult to replace or repair given that it’s soldered to the motherboard. This makes it difficult to get any work done on this little component.
Do check out the full teardown over at iFixit to see just how difficult it is to repair the Essential Phone.
Filed in . Read more about Essential Phone (PH-1) and Ifixit.