The new HTC M8 will be difficult to repair according to the experts with the battery hidden under the motherboard and glue used extensively to hold the device together.
A teardown of the new smartphone by repair outfit iFixit has seen the new HTC device which goes on sale in April given just two out of a possible 10 for reparability.
This has been described as a minor improvement on the score of one for the original HTC One when it was taken apart at the same time last year.
The screwless design from the first HTC One has not been copied for the second, as iFixit discovered.
With the new model HTC has moved to spring contacts instead of a cable for the display, though efforts to take apart the insides quickly took a turn for the worse, with a large quantity of tape interfering with proceedings. Glue is also heavily used in the production of the device, damaging the chances of repair.
iFixit claims that the motherboard has to be removed from the device in order to gain access to the battery, states the report, with the two components separated after removing more glue.
Components on the board include a number of Qualcomm-supplied components, including the quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor clocked at 2.3GHz, RF transceiver, power management chips, and a dynamic antenna matching tuner, accompanied by flash memory from SanDisk and other components from Avago, Synaptics, STMicroelectronics, and NXT.
The repair Company said that the burial and gluing of the battery and the fact that the display cannot be replaced without removing all other components is a problem.
They said that the large amount of tape used in the construction works against the device, though the solid external construction and the marginally-simplified case-opening procedure does still work in its favour to raise the score above the minimum.
