S21 Ultra is not as repairable as the S21
March 14, 2021Smartphones are getting harder to repair as internal components are getting smaller with each passing year. Moreover, some brands use glue and non-standard screws in the assembly process. Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S21 Ultra, is hard to repair, similar to last year’s Galaxy S20 Ultra.
We did a teardown of the Galaxy S21 Ultra and gave it a repairability score of 3/10. That score matches the Galaxy S20 Ultra’s repairability score but falls short of the vanilla Galaxy S21’s score of 4/10. The Galaxy S21 Ultra uses the same Phillips screws in all the important places, but it also uses a lot of glue behind the battery, display, and rear panel, making it harder to disassemble the device.