The HTC One (M8) is a pretty phone with some great new features. Duo camera. Lockscreen gestures. Enhanced BlinkFeed! It’s also now 90-percent metal, up from the previous HTC One’s 70-percent, wrapping around to the device’s display. The design is premium and unlike many phones out there. It’s also one of the most difficult to repair, according to iFixit’s latest teardown. Thank goodness for HTC Advantage.
When it took apart HTC’s new flagship, iFixit found that simply taking off the rear casing can do damage to internal components if you’re not careful. Worse, if you do manage to look inside, iFixit says there’s a liberal amount of tape and glue used, so getting to a particular component is also very difficult. The battery is actually beneath the device’s motherboard, so replacing it poses a huge risk (and challenge), and it’s actually lightly adhered to the LCD shield. The M8’s display, meanwhile, is buried beneath a ton of components, so replacing that takes plenty of work.
The new HTC One is one of the worst smartphones to repair, getting a patented iFixit score of 2 out of 10 on the repairability scale. The rear casing is difficult to take off without damaging, the battery is buried, and replacing the screen, often a phone’s most common repair, requires one to go through the entire phone. However, with the M8 being 90-percent metal, it’s surely one of the more durable on the market. Just forget about looking on the inside.
If you do damage your device, HTC actually has the aforementioned Advantage program that will ease the pain of a broken device. It’s nice to have the fallback of a solid warranty. But not so nice that the M8 is such a pain to repair.
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