Samsung's revealed but as-yet unreleasedGalaxy S4, designed to sit at the very top of the company's smartphone line-up, has been given high marks for repairability thanks to a tear-down video published online this week.
In the video, provided by an anonymous source with access to the pre-release hardware toTechnoBuffalo, a retail-model Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone is taken apart into its constituent components - and while the quality of the video isn't great, it does reveal a device that should be significantly easier to repair than many on the market today.
In the video, even just the removal of the rear casing - which can be achieved without tools, as with previous Galaxy S smartphone models - reveals advantages over its rivals in the market: the battery in the Galaxy S4 is fully user-replaceable, meaning that when it has stopped holding a charge as well as it once did it can be quickly swapped for a new battery without having to replace the phone, while the internal storage can be upgraded thanks to a micro-SD card slot.
Removing nine screws and delving deeper into the hardware, the Galaxy S4 is revealed as being an extremely easy device to repair - even compared to Samsung's previous-generation Galaxy S3 handset - thanks to individual components being removable and replaceable without any difficulty. The only caveat is with the display, which uses a tightly-bonded Gorilla Glass protective layer that is harder to separate than in previous Samsung devices.
Despite this, the site's source is calling the handset one of the most easy to repair on the market today, which is a world away from its rivals like the glass-backedNexus 4 or the aluminium unibody HTC One - ranked as the worst phone on the market for repairability - neither of which allow the user to do so much as replace the internal battery after its usable life is over.
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