Battery access
Can a normal person replace the battery with a screwdriver and a guide? Glue and heat guns cost points.
Method
How we score
One card, five dimensions, 25 points. Applied identically to every device.
The 25-point repair card
Each dimension is scored 1 to 5. A device that is unopenable scores near zero no matter how good the hardware is — because in three years it is landfill.
Spare parts
Can you buy the screen, battery and port at a fair price, from the maker or a reputable supplier?
Teardown ease
Screws versus adhesive, standard versus proprietary bits, modular versus soldered.
Software support
How many years of security updates are actually committed, in writing.
Documentation
Official service manuals, parts diagrams and a community that has already done the job.
Independence
We earn commission from affiliate links. That is the entire business model, and it is disclosed on every page. A brand cannot buy a score, a placement, or a retraction. If a product is bad, the affiliate link still exists — we simply tell you not to buy it.
What we do not do
- We do not accept payment for a score or a placement.
- We do not publish a repair score we cannot justify from public teardown evidence, official service documentation and owner reports.
- We do not hide a product's flaws behind an affiliate link.
- We do not use machine translation without a human pass on navigation and claims.
Who runs this, and how the work is done
ReloopGear is written and maintained by one person. There is no newsroom, no agency and no sponsored content team. That is a limitation as much as a principle: a single editor cannot buy fifty phones, so the method is built around evidence you can check yourself rather than around lab claims you have to take on trust.
Everything published here is signed off by a human before it goes live, including the translated navigation and the claims in each article.
Sources behind every score
- Official service documentation: parts catalogues, disassembly guides, published update commitments.
- Independent teardowns, primarily iFixit, cross-checked against the maker's own repair guides.
- Owner reports from long-term threads and refurbisher listings, used to sanity-check failure points.
- The retailer's own specification and warranty page at the time of writing.
Spotted a score you think is wrong? Email hello@reloopgear.com with the evidence. Corrections are published on the article itself, not quietly edited away.