Huawei Mate 20 Pro Teardown Shows A Difficult Repair

Huawei has pulled of yet another one with the Mate 20 Pro. Almost guaranteed to top photography charts, the company's highest-end flagship boasts of quite a number of innovations, though not all of them being positively received. It may have even come at the cost of durability, as JerryRigEverything recently showed. Now the YouTube digs inside to see what other surprises it has in store.

The Huawei Mate 20 Pro was already torn down by iFixit last month and it got a slightly low 4 out of 10. That score is definitely warranted given how difficult it was to pry the glass back off. It's durable and unbending, alright, but also unyielding even with lots of heat.

Zack Nelson notes a few interesting things about the phone's innards. Unlike its competitors, for example, Huawei didn't make use of a copper heat pipe, water-based or otherwise. Instead, it makes use of some thermal paste and metal plates to dissipate the heat. The earpiece speaker is also located a bit lower and further from the actual speaker hole so that Huawei could use a bigger speaker to best utilize the space.

Sadly, the teardown also reveals the type of in-screen fingerprint scanner used in the Mate 20 Pro. It's the type that is really bonded to the display, so that breaking one or the other requires replacing both. That means not only difficulty but also expense.

The good news is that not everyone will be as strong as Nelson so the Huawei Mate 20 Pro remains a durable phone for most cases. Sadly, if and when accidents happen, it's going to be just as tough to open and repair.