The Essential Phone is all about openness, except for the hardware
Andy Rubin's Essential Phone got praised for solid build quality and beautiful, monolithic design. But pry it open, as iFIxit recently did, and it becomes quite a messy affair -- especially if you're looking to repair it.
The phone was incredibly hard to open: It required a can of Super Cold spray and the phone was basically destroyed in the process. And even when the iFixit folks opened it, they found it extremely tough to reach any meaningful, repairable part.
This, along with several odd design decisions (read the full teardown here) was enough for iFixit to award the device a 1/10 repairability score. This means the phone's really, really hard to repair, which is a tie with HTC One, which also got one meager repairability point from iFixit back in 2013.
To be fair, Essential never advertised that the Essential Phone would be easy to repair. And given the phone's design -- it was one of the first phones on the market with a screen that covers nearly its entire front side -- one couldn't expect wonders on the repairability front.
But still, Essential is a company that takes pride in being open; it uses stock Android software, has a logo-less design and points out that the phone is the owner's "personal property." Unfortunately, that won't help you if you try to repair it, as that's a task even professionals likely won't be able to do.
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
