The Poco F1, made by Xiaomi sub-brand Pocophone, has now undergone a full teardown highlighting just how easy it might be to repair the flagship device. The handset is already made to be as cost-effective as possible, sporting no NFC capabilities and a plastic body despite its top-tier internal smartphone components. However, it appears as though the manufacturer paid a lot of attention to how well the handset can be taken apart as well. That becomes obvious as soon as the associated teardown video – uploaded and presumably created by Twitter user ‘@bang_gogo’ – gets going. To begin with, opening up the back of the device seems to be as simple as removing the dual-SIM drawer and a single T3 screw before pulling back to reveal plastic clips holding everything in place. Once the back casing has been folded off to the side, because it’s still connected via ribbon cables, the remaining screws are all Phillips head screws.
A total of ten of those fasteners hold the motherboard enclosure in addition to housing the contact-style connectors for the earpiece and LED flash components. A single ribbon cable and board-to-board (BTB) connectors act as a link between the fingerprint scanner to the main board and once that’s removed the cover comes away. Next, after the battery cover is peeled away, the battery, motherboard, and daughterboard are all clearly visible. The motherboard it house is also shown to be directly connected to the earpiece, front camera, the infrared sensor, and the infrared illuminator are all visible at the top. Each of those is connected by the same lego-style connectors and both the camera and infrared equipment seem to slip out without any further work. In fact, either lego connectors or button connectors appear throughout the entire teardown. Disconnecting the radio antenna, battery, main cable, display, and volume button connections will let the whole assembly be pulled out except for the battery and bottom components.
Seven more Phillips screws need to be removed to allow complete access to the daughterboard and remove the battery. The speaker comes away with the cover for that board, allowing the vibrator motor to come out. The latter of those is connected via contact in a similar fashion to the earpiece and LED flash. That leaves just the battery to come out last, leaving the device’s liquid cooling and component-housing molded framework in place. While it’s obviously still going to take some finesse to repair the initial offering from Xiaomi’s new sub-brand, the video does show that a full teardown is possible if users need to get to the handset’s non-removable battery. In fact, it turns out that 4,000mAh isn’t really non-removable at all but could be taken out if it did need to be replaced. Meanwhile, the full scale of the cooling system is also shown as are the infrared face scanning components. The latter of those is specially designed to keep the flagship Snapdragon 845 SoC from overheating and stretches across just over half the length of the handset.
https://twitter.com/bang_gogo_/status/1034334825853870081