Gadgetory

it's time to tear down the beautiful translucent back to HTC u12 plus its had a rough day its buttons have come off and it's bent out of shape but I found a nifty little trick using my metal tweezers I apply pressure to both sides of the missing power button hole and it allows me to turn the phone off which is important for a teardown then the back panel lifts up and away from the phone body normally unless you want to drastically flex your phone in half you should use heat and a thin metal pry tool to remove the back I'll use a plastic pry tool to unplug the fingerprint scanner ribbon cable and the translucent blue glass is released entirely from the phone it has that gradient effect going on where it's more clear in the center than it is on the outside this gives us a pretty good look underneath the glass into the phone and it seriously looks awesome HTC has added a decorative loincloth over the battery with a nice printed circular design this is just a decoration and has no functional value the NFC is functional though and that wraps around the upper half of the phone above the plastic there are eight normal Phillips head screws holding that top plastic in place I'll remove those screws and pull it away from the phone it has the gold contact pads on the back that allowed the NSC to communicate with the motherboard the next thing is to remove the decently sized 3500 milliamp hour battery unclipping the lego-like battery connector from the motherboard along with both of the charging port extension ribbons thankfully the whole battery can pull out and away from the phone body not a whole lot of effort is needed no magic pull tabs which is totally fine as long as that adhesive doesn't have a death grip another thing that's removable is the SIM card tray which conveniently has an expandable memory SD card slot bonus points for that the little ribbons at the corner of the motherboard are for the super annoying pressure sensors along each side of the phone I'll show you more of these in a second the middle orange ribbon is for the display and then we have the other pressure-sensitive ribbon that includes the power and volume buttons over here before we get a good look at those strips though we have to remove the motherboard I'll pull off these little black wire cables all of this might seem kind of complicated but this is nothing compared to how an organized HTC used to be HTC's older phones were more unorganized than Picasso and a paper shredder and clipped the dual front-facing cameras and pulled the motherboard out from the frame little guy is built simple enough it does have dual rear cameras plugged into the back each with their own Lego style connector the normal 12 megapixel camera comes with oh is but the two times zoom lens does not have any Hardware stabilization electronic maybe but nothing that's visible from the outside HTC does always have to stick some weird stuff in their design like this dual LED flash on its own removable ribbon cable it's probably built this way so that it would line up dead center on the back panel between the camera lenses but it still kind of feels like HTC forgot about it and had to add it back in last minute i reattached both rear cameras into the motherboard like little Legos and HTC is actually one of the first companies to put four cameras into a smart phone huge thumbs up for innovation but my favorite was two years ago back with the HTC ten when they added optical Hardware stabilization to the front-facing camera which was also a first this year that front stabilization is no more but we have two identical eight megapixel cameras now win some lose some down at the bottom of the phone we have these six Phillips head screws holding the loudspeaker and charging port I'll remove the top plastics and would you look at that instead of a circular coin vibrator like we've seen in the past on HTC phones they're using a rectangular taptic engine like we saw inside of the pixel - and basically all of the iPhones some people really care about their vibrations and taptic motors are top of the line for vibrator fanatics loudspeaker comes out next this is one of the two stereo speakers HTC counts the earpiece as the second one it has the same gold contact pads on the back for communicating with the phone and finally the charging port super tiny little guy with a blue rubber ring around the tip to help with that ip68 water resistance rating inside the phone it's fun that HTC has accessorized their internal coloring with the blueness of the back glass panel now let's talk about one of the biggest flaws in HTC's design the pressure-sensitive buttons and squeezable sides if you remember the buttons aren't actually buttons they are little unmoving protrusions in the phone frame that can come off if persuaded and once that button is off the buttons function is unusable on the phone unless you know you carry around a spare pair of tweezers like I showed at the beginning of this video who doesn't have one of those the pressure-sensitive ribbons are the electronic components that capture each short and long of your hand through that soft aluminum they run along each side of the phone each side is essentially the same I'll pull off this long plastic protector and then start working on removing the ribbon the problem here is that it looks like HTC has permanently adhered the ribbon to the frame of the phone making button replacements or squeezed motion replacements impossible without replacing the whole frame anyway even while attempting to be gentle my ribbon was torn and portions of the contact pads were left attached to the frame rendering my phone unusable you never realize how often you use a power button until it's gone here's a close-up look at the contact points remaining on the inner side of that metal frame normally in a teardown video I would assemble the phone so let us working after I'm done it's pretty annoying that something so inexpensive and common as a button is rendering my $800 phone useless to make matters worse the screen of the HTC u 12 is permanently glued to the frame of the phone and would be very difficult to harvest for parts so reclaiming any value out of this phone is going to be difficult since those buttons are gone the HTC u12 plus is currently in the lead for the least repairable phone of 2018 but at least the charging port rubber matches the back speaking of which since my phone is now dead if you own a translucent blue u12 plus and end up accidentally breaking the back glass because you know a case interfered with your squeezy bits tweet me a picture of the carnage and I'll trade you my back glass that's still in one piece I won't be needing it the HTC ten was one of my favorite phones of 2016 back in the day I thought that HTC start heading back that direction and ditch the squeezies but that's just my opinion let me know what you think down in the comments and thanks a ton for watching I'll see you around