14 DAY TRIAL // HTC pushed out its latest flagship, the One M9, early last month, during a big event held in Barcelona, at MWC 2015. The device has been recently been made available for purchase in territories like US and beyond.
Well, the curious folks at iFixit have already received their unit on which they obviously performed a teardown. But before we get to that, we need to point out an important aspect.
It appears that they noticed that their One M9 came with a pretty evident scratch on the display, out of the box, which doesn’t sound too encouraging. Furthermore, iFixit says that, upon turning on the handset, they found a defective pixel towards the center of the screen.
What’s even more interesting is that a few days ago we reported a similar story related to the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. T-Mobile started shipping out units early, ahead of the April 10 launch, and customers who received these models have been complaining that the phones come with scratches on the displays and even dead pixels.
An odd trend for what are supposed to be flagship devices coming in premium packages.
The HTC One M9 proves very hard to repair
Anyway, putting aside details about the quality of the product, iFixit proceeded to open up the smartphone.
Apparently, HTC abstained from using glue to enclose the One M9 in the fashion it did with the original One. So opening up the back case entails one removes a few screws and then prying the back off (some clips must pose resistance at first but this difficulty can be conquered).
Once inside, it becomes pretty evident that the HTC One M9 won’t be easily repairable. First of all, the motherboard is glued over the battery, so if you have any hopes ever removing the battery, you should know that you’ll need to take out the main circuit board first.
Moreover, the battery is glued on the other side as well, making things even tougher. From then on the other components including camera module, BoomSound speakers and display are easily accessible.
However, some prying and heating is needed to take these components out, since the display panel is fixed in place with a very sticky adhesive.
The final fixability score given is 2/10, so, kids, don’t you try this at home!
