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.  Read more...