Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus unveiled its latest flagship phone called OnePlus 5 in India on 22nd June. While the device is getting a lot of positive reviews, the after sales service has become the talking point due to increase in the cost.
iFixit who publishes repair guides for gadgets tested OnePlus 5 to gauge the reparability. The teardown of OnePlus 5 reveals that 3.5mm audio jack and USB Type-C port come away from the phone with the rear panel, which eases the replacement of these parts.
The motherboard, which is held to the frame using 7 non-proprietary screws, consists of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor with Adreno 540 GPU and 8GB LPDDR4 RAM alongside 128 GB of Samsung UFS 2.1 storage. The dual camera setup comprises of 20MP Sony IMX350 telephoto camera adjacent to 16MP Sony IMX398 wide-angle camera. After detaching bottom speaker, the last component to come out is 12.5 watt-hour battery that can be easily pulled out from the rear panel using pull tab.
Overall, iFixit gave repairability rating of 7 on 10 for OnePlus 5. To put in perspective, iPhone 7 Plus and Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus got a repairability score of 7 and 4 respectively.
Also read: OnePlus 5 – Is The 10% Increase In Price Justified Or Is It Too Costly?
The favorable aspects while repairing OnePlus 5 include the use of non-proprietary screws, ease of access of several modular components, and use of easy to removable plastic clips to hold the display.
On the other hand, the downsides are fused display and glass with home button integrated into the display panel and the complex access to the battery.
Conclusion
Overall, the point of these teardowns is to determine how easy or difficult it could be to repair a phone. A phone with a decent score will be easier and cheaper to repair (depending on the parts that need repairing, of course), while a phone with a low score will be difficult and expensive to repair. Use of non-proprietary parts and a modular design also helps in bringing down repair costs.
