Enlarge / The Fairphone two was developed with repairability in mind. (credit: Andrii Degeler )

iFixit’s teardowns are handy disassembly guides, and they’re great for confirming just what hardware is included inside our gadgets, but most current customer electronics do not fare well when it comes time for the internet site to assign a repairability score. Today’s smartphones are usually held together with proprietary screws and a lot of glue, and although there are apparent user-facing benefits to this manufacturing approach, it tends to make the gadgets harder to open, upgrade, and repair.

That’s not the case for the Fairphone two, an Android phone built by a Dutch startup that tends to make repairability and serviceability one of its primary characteristics. iFixit has torn down the telephone making use of just human hands and a Phillips-head screwdriver, and has offered the phone a uncommon 10 out of 10 on its repairability scale due to the fact of how easy it is for customers to open and fix. The battery and the screen—two components that will most want to be replaced or repaired more than the lifetime of the phone—pop out with out any tools at all. Removing the modules for the camera, microphone, and headphone jack is not significantly far more hard.

Despite that ideal score, there is a single mark against the Fairphone 2. The front glass and the LCD panel are fused together, which tends to make the screen appear much better but increases the price of fixing it since you need to replace the glass and the LCD even if you only break one of them. This is a frequent iFixit bugaboo going all the way back to the days of the iPhone 5, and why it didn’t knock points off the score is anybody’s guess.