It’s hard to buy a repairable smartphone. That’s partly because it’s hard to make a
repairable smartphone, but we’ve torn down enough devices to know
that when manufacturers truly make repair a priority, they can do surprising things
Today, I have three smartphones from manufacturers that have taken that idea to the extreme.
First let’s look at Teracube. The Teracube 2e I have here is the company’s second smartphone.
The first was less modular, but still true to their focus on sustainability and reliability.
Teracube offers a 4-year warranty and a flat fee on all phone repairs,
basically a unicorn in the smartphone warranty landscape of 2021.
The back cover has two indents at the bottom for prying up with a fingernail,
and though the clips are tenacious, I’ll take them any day over glue.
Inside, the bright green battery is front and center, ready for the taking. No glue,
no fragile cable to move, just an old-school,
pop-out battery. I’ll dive deeper into the Teracube in a sec, but for now let’s move on.
The Librem 5 is considerably thicker—probably
closer to what you might expect a “repairable” phone to look like.
Purism, the company behind this phone, has taken a privacy-focused approach to their design,
but that emphasis has repairability benefits.
Like the Teracube, a notch in the back panel gives me a place to pry it up,
and the battery is immediately accessible.
Just beyond that, three screws hold down a black plastic cover,
hiding modular and user-replaceable cellular and wifi/bluetooth modules.
A modular wireless card is something you
don't even see much in laptops anymore, nevermind in a phone.
Wireless chips don’t commonly fail in smartphones, but this is a great
example of the kind of modularity we could see if manufacturers would prioritize it.
If this is what a small company can make, imagine what a giant
company with virtually unlimited resources could make, if modularity were their goal.
The last phone I have here is the Fairphone 3. Fairphone is probably
the most experienced repairable smartphone manufacturer. This is their third iteration
on the idea of a smartphone with extreme modularity, and even some upgradability.
Sorta like Google’s Project Ara, but… you can actually buy this one.
Like the Teracube 2e and Librem 5, the Fairphone 3 has a plastic
rear cover that’s clipped in place. The see-through plastic is a pretty
cool touch. As soon as the cover is off, you can pull out the battery.
Fairphone goes a quite a few steps further than just a user-swappable battery though,
and that’s where it starts to differentiate itself from the other two phones we’re looking at.
They even include a tiny little phillips driver right inside the box when you buy this phone.
I’m using our screwdriver because it’s a bit nicer, but if you don’t already have the right
tool, this is an amazing invitation to tinker. Past the screws, an opening pick unclips the
screen from the midframe, and just like that I’ve done a battery and a screen removal.
That’s a very quick four-step procedure to remove both of the
most commonly-repaired smartphone components. Fairphone has done their homework, and it shows.
There’s a lot more modularity in the Fairphone 3. Most of the components inside are contained
in replaceable modules held down with phillips screws, which is so cool.
If you want to see more Fairphone, you can check out our full teardown on iFixit.com.
Let’s talk about displays, though. Like batteries, display repairs have become increasingly difficult
and expensive over the years. The high price is partly due to the way display technology
has advanced, but a difficult repair only adds to the already-high replacement cost.
With their batteries and covers removed,
both the Teracube and the librem 5 look more like typical android phones.
It looks like to get to the displays, you’ll have to remove some shields,
disconnect and remove most of the components, and unscrew and remove the circuit boards.
Many Android smartphones have their displays sort of built into the frame of the phone,
so it makes the most sense to replace the display with the frame as one part.
A little more investigation reveals the Teracube and Librem 5 both actually have
some pretty forgiving display adhesive, so you could theoretically could perform
a screen replacement shortly after removing the battery without removing the rest of the parts.
So we have three really unusual phones here, all very repairable by pretty much anyone.
They’re not as sleek or feature-packed as your typical $1,000 flagship phone,
but they’re also not designed to be used for 18 months and then… thrown away.
All of these companies are staking out some really interesting ground in the smartphone space,
and we’re so glad they’re doing it. Even if they don’t sell in Apple or Samsung numbers,
they help show us what’s possible, give consumers more choices, and
put a bit more pressure on other manufacturers, who often make repair an afterthought.