Teardown master iFixit has taken apart the new HTC One M9 piece by piece, and the results show the Taiwanese smartphone maker's flagship smartphone is one device that is nearly impossible to fix.
iFixit's teardown shows HTC has not changed its mind much about designing a smartphone that is easy to fix. Last year, the website gave the One M8 a dismal score of 2/10 when it comes to the phone's fixability, but HTC has not learned its lessons from the previous flagship, which is succeeded by the One M9 getting the same disappointing score of 2/10.
The teardown begins with a harbinger of sorts of all the things iFixit will disapprove of later on. The website says HTC's quality assurance seems to have relaxed standards, as the device that was shipped to them came with an unmistakable scratch on the lower left side of the glass display. Upon turning on the device, iFixit noticed a defective pixel sitting straight down the middle of the screen.
All arguments - of whether or not the unit iFixit received was a bad lemon out of many good ones - aside, the One M9 is surprisingly easy to open since it uses screws and not some particularly strong glue like the original HTC One. At first glance, iFixit says the One M9 resembles the One M8, although with one particularly pleasing difference: the absence of tape that covered most of the insides of the One M9's predecessor.
Besides that, however, pretty much everything was no longer a pretty sight to iFixit. In particular, the teardown guys were quite pissed at the fact that the motherboard is glued tightly to the "soft" battery, which in turn is also glued on the other side. This means if the battery on a user's One M9 unexpectedly dies down, he won't be able to easily take off the old battery and swap in a new one. If a repairman manages not to damage a working battery while prying off the motherboard, then there's a good chance he can still damage the battery when he tries to un-glue it off.
"We complained last year, and we have to complain again this year. A lithium-ion battery is a consumable - it's only good for a limited number of charge cycles before it starts to lose capacity and needs to be replaced," said iFixit. "Burying the battery so deeply within the device signs its death certificate the day of its manufacturing birth."
Buried under the battery is the phone's sapphire-lens camera, a BoomSound speaker box full of Styrofoam, and the I/O board. iFixit says it also had some difficulty taking out the LCD display, one of the first smartphone components that usually require repair, as it was fixed down with two sticky strips of adhesive that had to be heated and pried to be removed.
"We find numerous cryptic characters scrawled on the back of the LCD. Does this One have a secret message for us?" said iFixit. "After consulting our Highly Trained Cryptologist, we've been informed that they're probably just quality assurance marks."
All in all, the One M9 teardown shows HTC's newest phone is not an easy thing to fix, which should make its Uh Oh replacement program, where it replaces all damaged smartphones within a year of purchase, very useful.
