it's the newest entry into the world of
Android smartphones and it's only got
what you need
meet the essential phone the first phone
from essential products designed by
Android co-founder Andy Rubin what's
this new streamlined phone got to offer
we're gonna find out by tearing it down
our teardown team had to freeze their
essential phone to get into it but after
thinking things over we decided to go a
different route
we knew our eye opener was not gonna cut
it with this teardown so how about we
treat this phone like an Apple watch
lots of heat and our curved razor blade
to give us our first point of entry but
not without some slight bezel casualties
may be freezing was the right way to go
after all
continuing our standard strategy of
heating and prying using opening picks
shows that while our opening experience
may have been slightly easier the second
time around the procedure is still
deadly to the display assembly with
multiple points of delamination and some
total display separation the only way to
describe the opening procedure for the
essential phone is destructive the
display is finally separated and were
greeted with a screwed and display cable
and a blank mid frame shield after the
arduous process of removing the display
we're shocked to find that the battery
is held in place by some very handy
adhesive scripts the stretch release
adhesive is the most repaired friendly
adhesive and makes removing the battery
extremely easy if you can get inside
without busing to display this is an 11
point 7 watt hour battery that has
slightly more capacity than even the
galaxy s 8 we saw recently which came in
at 11.5 5 watt hours inspecting the dock
area reveals that the USBC port is
soldered to the motherboard which breaks
our heart the essential joined the
dongle revolution so the audio jack
charging combo port is going to get a
whole lot of extra wear unfortunately if
you run into any problems with your USB
C port you'll be on the hook for either
an expensive micro soldering repair or
even a more expensive full motherboard
replacement speaking of motherboards
this one is home to 128 gigabytes of
Samson made ufs storage and 4 gigabytes
of Samsung made lpddr4 Ram and tons of
other chips if you want to find out what
they are head over to the teardown at
ifixit.com to see a full list of chips
we've ID'd
X is the 13 megapixel dual camera module
with image fusion technology and the
eight megapixel front-facing selfie cam
but the essential phone completely
disassembled it's time to talk
repairability the essential phones
scored at disappointing one out of 10
and here's why on the upside to the
extent that screws are used these are
all standard Philips JIS fasteners the
battery secured with repair friendly
stretch release adhesive too bad and so
and accessible and on the downside the
USB C port is soldered to the
motherboard and with no headphone jack
it'll be subject to extra wear and
finally nearly invisible seams and
copious adhesive means any attempt at
repair is likely to inflict as much
damage as it fixes that's all for this
teardown be sure to check out the
full-length tear down over at ifixit.com
and don't forget to click that subscribe
button
tear down seasons ramping up and we
don't want you to miss out you know what
I'm kind of jealous that we didn't get
to freeze anything
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I love you Han Solo
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