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LG G5 Gets a High 8/10 Repairability Score (geek.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article from Geek.com: The one thing that makes LG's G5, the flagship smartphone it launched in February, stand out from the crowd is its modularity. As iFixit learned, that means more than just being able to quickly swap the battery for a camera grip or DAC. In its teardown, iFixit found that LG has made it easy to replace lots of the G5's parts. The process might not be as simple as giving the phone a squeeze and sliding a module out, but it's a heck of a lot easier than it is with many phones and tablets. [...] All in all, it makes for a pretty tidy teardown and it earned the G5 an impressive 8/10.
A major manufacturer making phones user serviceable deserve that praise.
With the trend going to sealed batteries and glue everywhere, it is good to know some manufacturers still do things well. Kudos to the Fairphone 2 BTW, this phone even have fucking disassembly instructions printed on it.
Just look at the Samsung repairablity scores for instance (S3:8, S4:8, S5:5, S6:4, S7:3). The latest HTC and Nexus have horrible scores too.
And as somebody who self-services a lot of devices (and has a spouse with a tendency to be hard on devices), this is good information. We actually just replaced an S4 with an Asus Zenfone2 because it was the most reasonable unlocked replacement that still had a swappable battery/SD-card. I hadn't even really looked at the LG phones but it sounds like something that I should keep on the radar.
That far my main experience has been with iDevices and Samsungs. The Samsungs haven't been too bad (replacing things like the USB port connector etc is quite easy), but I've found iPhones got increasingly more painful over item, but the Sammy's were at least reasonable up to the S5.