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All the king's horses and all the king's men could probably put Huawei's P20 Pro together again

But it'd be tricky: Teardown folk give mobe 4/10 for repairability

Armed with tools to send most smartphone manufacturers into a cold sweat, the team at iFixit have found the Huawei P20 Pro is going to be a tricky beast to repair. So best not drop it, OK?

The Register found much to like about the £799 smartphone, but the camera left us wanting when compared to Android rivals such as the Pixel 2 XL and Samsung S9.

The iFixit team pulled out the three main cameras and single 24 MP selfie camera.

While Huawei claims only the 8MP snapper features Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS), iFixit reckons the other 20MP monochrome and 40MP main cameras may also have the technology, although officially these rely on the Kirin Neural Processing Unit.

The motherboard features 6GB of LPDDR4 DRAM from Micron with a 64-bit octacore Kirin 970 doing the processing. Samsung provides the 128GB embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS), and Texas Instruments and HiSilicon perform battery charging and audio duties respectively.

Near-field communication is handled by NXP with an antenna on the back of the phone. iFixit notes that in the absence of wireless charging, the fragile glass backplate is present only for aesthetic purposes.

iFixit found the battery was a bit of a beast – 4,000mAh at 3.82V, or 15.28Wh, slapping down the 13.48Wh of Samsung's Galaxy S9+ and looking scornfully at the iPhone X's paltry 10.35. Different operating systems and configurations will mean your mileage (between trips to a power point) may vary.

Overall, iFixit rated the Huawei four out of ten (less than the iPhone X's six and on a par with the Galaxy S9+) for repairability.

The team was happy that most of the components were modular but less impressed with the hassle of getting to the battery and the grief involved in removing the screen, coupled with the double risk of breaking the glass on the front and rear. ®

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