LG G3's first teardown reveals how easy it is to fix

You have seen us get our hands all over the LG G3, compare it to multiple competitors and giving you our very own firm opinions on LG’s device of the year. Our friends at UBREAKIFIX are also not afraid of getting personal with the LG G3, but they have taken things a step further.

Leave it to the experts to go ahead and do a teardown of the mighty LG G3, while most of us would be scared to take some screws off. The UBREAKIFIX team has gone ahead and taken it all apart, showing us all its components and giving us an idea of how easily repairable it is.

LG G3 specs (just in case you forgot)

• 5.5-inch display with 2560 x 1440 resolution
• 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 CPU
• 2GB (or 3GB w/ 32GB model) of RAM
• 16/32 GB of internal storage (microSD support)
• 13MP/2.1MP cameras
• 3000 mAh removable battery

What stands out?

As expected from the usual teardown, things don’t look too exciting inside smartphones. We may find the occasional detail worth mentioning, so we should focus on those specific discoveries.

Right off the bat we can see that whopping 3,000 mAh battery, which is removable. This makes for a very pleasant battery swap process – simply pop out the old one and put the new one in. Isn’t it insane that many have to send devices in for “repair” just to have the battery exchanged?

Another upgrade seen in this teardown is an improved motherboard, only housing one small daughterboard. LG seems to have made many changes since the LG G2, giving us a more flexible device that is easily repaired. The G2 had a “controller board split along both sides of the motherboard”.

Also interesting is the fact that this device has a TV antenna, which is very usual in Asian markets. It is very likely we won’t see this part in US versions. As for the motherboard, itself – it houses the following components.

• (Purple) Broadcom BCM4339 5G WiFi combo chip
• (Teal) Avago ACPM-7700 power amplifier module
• (Red) Qualcomm WTR1625L RF transceiver
• (Green) Qualcomm WFR1620 receive-only companion chip
• (Orange) SK Hynix 2GB/3GB LPDDR3 RAM layered on the 2.5 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor.
• (Yellow) ANX7812 USB SlimPort Tx IC
• (Blue) Texas Instruments BQ24296 battery charge management and system power path management chip.
• Toshiba THGBMBG8D4KBAIR 32 GB on-board NAND flash memory on the other side

Is it hard the phone hard to repair?

The teardown proves the LG G3 is quite a success in terms of engineering and repairability. UBREAKIFIX claims the device was very well made, giving it an 8/10. The use of different connectors, instead of flexes, will help with repair time and effort. In addition, the location of the screen connectors makes the device much easier to fix.