Gadgetory

hey everybody I'm Dee Snider energy for TechRepublic and I'm bill detwiler had technology editor of techrepublic we're here today to crack open the Samsung Galaxy Nexus this is something that we do every week and this is our second day in a row doing one live Turner on the cnet stage yesterday we cracked open the amazon kindle fire so today bill it's the Galaxy Nexus what everybody why we do this and how long we've been doing it and what the what the deal is well if you've been doing it for about five years now for five years the first thing that we took apart was the xbox 360 the original and our audience members liked it so much that we started doing one every week we take these apart because our audience really likes to know what's inside them it helps them determine what might go wrong and how they might fix them if they if it does something does go wrong and they need to replace something very good so let's get started let's krump in and you start cracking open the the Samsung Galaxy Nexus when he totally what's the first thing you do when you're cracking open one of these right well the first thing you're going to do is try to get inside the case and you're going to try and do this as delicately as possible so with most smartphones that have a removable battery like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus you can just remove the back cover that's not a problem and then you can see the battery right here is inside so I'm going to take the battery out and now once we've removed the battery the phone is is powered down so we're not worried about any kind of shorts inside the inside the device which is always what we want to do is remove or disconnect the battery first I need pants inside there yes or no just short and so the next point we're going to do is we're going to remove the screws that hold the front case in the rear case onto the front panel assembly now luckily Samsung was very kind to us or kind to anyone that wants to take these apart they actually used standard Phillips double zero screws some dice Baker's don't do that the use of that start with the name of a fruit especially they like to use specialized screws yes try wing screws pentalobe screws in the case of the Apple iPhone 4 iPhone 3s and so but even those you can there are screwdrivers sometimes they're tough to find that you can get to do this right so why don't you tell everybody where you get the tools that you use to do these so that's an excellent point even though there are specialized tools required usually with the internet you can find these kind of tools you can see I've got a variety here of very small screwdrivers or screwdriver with vets and thin metal blades and I also have some plastic spudger zaz these are called and they helped me just disconnect things from inside the case you can even get specialized case opening tools that are designed to remove glass cases without sort of marring the surface of the metal on the device when we first started this we actually use the butter knife but we tried that once that's right tool a butter knife razor blades exactly now that we have the all the screws on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus removed from the back panel we're going to remove this case from around the front panel assembly unfortunately on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus I have to use this metal blade i'm going to do so very carefully putting it between the thin between the case and the metal or the glass panel so this we're going to be very gently i'm even going to use my fingernail a little bit and work our way around the outside of this and i do have to say builds a bit of a brain surgeon in this we added there was a time when we wanted to do more of these cracking opens and you know we didn't want it to all be on bill and so we we kind of would hire some of our contributors and really highly technical people to do this and almost always the device came back like somebody taking a hatchet to it and what was not in working condition you know one of the things one of the sticks that that we do is that we always try to put these back together in working order actually i should say bill always gets them back together in working order and part of that is because he's real patient with them you kind of you can't force this that's one of the sort of when people ask me how do I do this or how can they do this one of the things I tell them is you have to be very patient you can't force things so you can see I've got one side of the plastic here popped loose and now we have to get the other side but again you can't force it you got to be patient I you can hear it which connect there a lot of the mistake people make when they're trying to pull their own devices apart or do something like this is that something sort of won't come and they force it right that's right that's when Andrea breaks so you can see that didn't take very long but I was very careful not to break the glass panel because we don't want to do that and how we've removed the back cover and we can see the insides of the Galaxy Nexus you can see our main circuit board here there are the speaker assembly it's already see one of the cameras so from this point we're just going to go ahead and remove the circuit boards and keep keep on going very good so when you're doing these in the studio like like we said we published one of these every week and bill does not only the cracking open where he's taking photos all along the way but he also publishes an analysis post we talks about what's inside the device and you know what you need to know in comparison to this device to another destroyed so one of the things that is interesting is that when he's doing this is kind of like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time because bills not only cracking it open he's also taking notes he's taking photos all along the process we've got some photos up on the screen that show you you know build taking photos and you know getting into the device and he's making notes of each of these chips right so you'll show us a little bit about that process well it's so we have to do two or three things at one time and we'll be taking things apart on one part of the studio and then moving them over to another part of the studio and so it takes it's just another thing that takes a little bit of patience and one of the interesting things here with the Galaxy Nexus is that there's a lot of little connectors that you have to disconnect from the mother to be very gentle when you do that because once you're inside one of these devices if you break the device if you break one of the small connectors you have to find a replacement part and that's hard to do when we take these things apart the actually taking apart is very easy the hard part is binding replacement components manufacturers don't really like to do that yeah they want you to bring the device back to them to be repaired and be fixed well so they don't probably better to buy a new one that's right so they don't provide replacement parts very easily so it's it's a matter of being gentle not forcing things and making sure everything comes loose so but why don't you talk a little bit about how we choose which devices to crack though prize you do you're doing one of these every week and you've done lots of different things you've done with almost all the most important tablets this year you've also done you know all the prominent smartphones how do you choose which tablets which smartphones which products and what are some of the other things you've packed up we've cracked open old computers like the Tandy model 100 and old luggable laptop we've taken apart like I said the xbox 360 playstation 3's we've taken apart Apple iPhones I've fours just about any piece of new technology that audience might want to that their users might use that they might have to support they might want to use themselves you know when you're going to recommend this to a family member you want it to be rugged you want it to be solid you want to know that they're getting a quality product and so we do all kinds of stuff we've even even done some old stuff we've done some old amigas so from laptop so our phones and tablets Tandy we crack open in our CID MPC that's right some of this is is for educational value but some of it's also entertainment right because most people who are in technology they're very curious they just need to see what's going on inside yeah we're all geeks so part of this is just for our own fascination we love to see what's inside these you know and you can see here this is the Galaxy Nexus I'm gonna hold us up for everybody in the audience to see this is the Galaxy Nexus motherwort or the primary circuit board you can see all the chips that are on there the processor their chips on here from this as a Texas Instruments processor one point two gigahertz processor there are a lot of chips on here from Samsung their chips from silicon image there are chicks for chips from InvenSense there are all kinds of different chips on there and so when we're doing these you know a lot of a lot of what we do is research on the different types of chips on the manufacturers of those chips so that we can see how they're used commonly throughout different devices and you put those into your analysis oh you do in your analysis post you show like here the chips inside here are you know how they compare a lot of times you're compared to other devices so one of the things that you say when you crack these open off it is that you can tell a lot by about the company by the type of device that's right when you crack it open so you've cracked okis and open some things this year that you haven't always been real impressed with and you crack open some things that you were really impressed yeah right so tell us which are which what are the things that you're in most interested well the kindle fire wasn't it was an excellent example of something we cracked open we cracked it open yesterday and just so everybody sees no Jason mentioned that we always have to put these back together I'm gonna show everybody this is the kindle tablet that we put back together that we crack open yesterday and i put it back together so it works it functions so everything he always gets back together it working women always gets them back i can count on one hand the number of devices over a period of five years that bill has broken and putting them back together or cracking them open so like I said he's kind of the brain surgeon you know in this field all right you know what do you got here so tell us about what your what you got well we've removed like I said the motherboard now we've removed both of the cameras we have both the rear-facing and the front facing cameras and now we're going to remove this board that holds the storage chip and the micro SD card reader so we're going to go ahead and pop this loose again you're going to have to be very careful when you pop loose these connectors you don't want to damage the motherboard and then this is one of the things a lot of people ask me all these metal plates here yeah these are shields prevent electromagnetic interference from bothering the chips underneath so you have to be very gentle when you remove these or you'll risk damaging the chips underneath okay so we're going to do that gently kind of pop this loose and you're popping these loose so that you can see what chips are in this thing that's right when you're doing you're cracking open that's what you want to know that's right we want to see the processor we want to know who makes the baseband modem we want to know who makes the storage unit so for example this is a sand disk storage unit this is a 32 gig nand flash storage storage chip and underneath that we have a lot more chips there so we'll what's you know for people that do want to take or you know break their device what are the questions we get a lot is somebody drops their phone it cracks the screen and they want to they say look I just started my contract you know I can't I don't want to buy a whole new phone have to pay retail price for a whole new phone can I replace the screen myself right we get that but you get that question a lot of I do and so I just got that this week somebody emailed me and they had a cracked screen and they wanted to know whether or not they should replace it or not now and i'll use the Samsung Galaxy Nexus as a good example okay here's the problem with a lot of phones when people break their phone a lot of times they crack what's called the digitizer the front glass panel and that's the part that translates the motion of your finger into the actions on the phone and a lot of time that's that's the glass and that's what gets crack it's not the screen underneath okay sometimes if it is the screen underneath its crack then those are two separate components okay now with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus unfortunately the two are almost fused together permanently like with ajith with extremely strong adhesive okay so unless you have a heat gun unless you're willing to heat the edge around this glass here and separate that elusive left and then you can pull it apart then more than likely you're going to have to buy them as as a single unit you're going to have to buy the front last panel the digitizer and the LCD screen that's going to be a little more expect that it's going to be a little too expensive get both now on the Kindle we took apart yesterday they're actually 27 units they're very easy to separate just simple screws you lift one right after one right off of the other and so you can buy them separately and replace them fairly easy okay so if you go to if you have a device that you know breaks and you're not sure um you know if they're separate or if they're the same you know you can look at some of bills cracking opens that he's done and that can help you figure out you know whether you might need to buy just the digitizer or the just the screen or bow when you do it so that's all cracking open blog on techrepublic has all of your cracking opens in it right people can follow me on twitter too I bet he'll Detwiler very good and get all the latest updates on cracking up so we'll what about putting these back together you know does it take longer to put it back together than it takes to get it apart me there's a lot of small pieces here I'm not usually honestly because when I'm taking them apart I'm usually taking photos i am doing things very gently especially if I've never been inside the device before I don't know how the device is put together the manufacturers don't give you manuals or don't give us manuals to take them apart so you have to sort of figure your way through the device you know for when I got the Galaxy Nexus I didn't know whether I was going to be able to separate this part from the case and the front panel or whether they were going to be two separate pieces or together so I had to sort of feel my way through and that takes some time so I know you've come in sometimes you like bill have you got it apart yet and I'm like no I'm still working still trying to get this piece you know to get so that gets back to the bed thing of if you are trying to take a device apart yourself you know take take it easy if it doesn't want to come apart don't force it because that's almost always when you run into trouble it's almost roadies when when it breaks so let's take a look at what you're doing now bill you pulling something else apart what do you got so I'm going ahead and removing now that we've rue removed the circuit boards now that we remove the card reader the cameras we're going to go ahead and we're going to remove some of the components here on the bottom this is going to be the the headphone jack down here it's got a single screw that comes out this is an audio unit uh-huh this is a little headphone jack we're going to go ahead and remove this and then at the bottom we also have the micro USB port and the microphone so we're going to go ahead and there's actually the cellular antenna here you can see these very thin wires so while we're talking about it these are the wires for the radios that are inside the phone is it be very careful with these when you're disconnecting them that you don't rip them that you don't break them something pretty example what are the things you've said to me before is you know about how you can tell a lot about accompanied by the way the products are made is here on this product they've got a nice line there that holds that antenna wire that's right where you say sometimes you'll go in there and you'll see literally just they've taped like wires down came across right and some of the devices I took apart the HTC Flyer that was a device that wasn't a bad device but you could tell that HTC who has a background in phone manufacturing so for example and no necessarily tablet tablet so the way the wires were run inside the case the way they went down to the channel the way the components were installed it just wasn't as clean as it could have been just a little sloppy it was a little sloppy I wish I'd put a little bit more effort into the design of the internal as they did on the X term so you know and you see that sometimes with products from Apple they do a very good job inside the device just as well as they do outside the device ok amazon did a good job with the kindle how about samsung you've got to open a lot of sense samsung as well to samsung has a history of device manufacturing and so they have you can see the cracking open is pretty much complete here there's not too much too many other components to remove so i mean they've done a very nice job of component izing all the different pieces the cameras are separate so if one of the cameras did break and you were able to buy a replacement camera then you can take this you could buy you know a very small camera like this you can take the phone apart put the camera back into the phone and you know you've got a brand new camera you know phone will work again how about you know what are the questions we get is how about upgrading your own device you know taking these things apart and like that's an 8 megapixel camera you know what I'd like to put a tent 16 megapixel camera in there can you do that unfortunately no they're really I I actually did get a call from someone or an email from someone the other day and they wanted to upgrade the memory in their tablet now I told him well I'm sorry unless you have really good soldering skills and you're going able to separate this chip from the circuit board underneath you're not going to be able to upgrade the storage in the phone it's just not practical these things are designed their customized these warts are all custom and the software that works am ray assessed as sometimes the drivers that work with the camera may or may not work with a different camera not like a PC where you can buy a different video card and the video card will come with drivers and you just put new guys with new drivers on there you have if you were to replace the cam afraid to my question you would have to somehow get into the software itself and replace that dryer and that you know really men would I mean you really just have to find apart somewhere so if you were to buy a Galaxy Nexus and you drop it the next day well I hope you have insurance and take it back to the store and get to you know replace it under warranty yeah if the warranty is expired or if there's really nothing to lose then yeah sure go online and you're willing to do this kind of thing right sure go online see if you can find the parts you might even be able to find an old one that no one is using anymore that they're willing to sell you for parts like maybe it has a cracked screen but maybe you need to digitize it or maybe it has won't charge anymore but you need to screen out of it well you can do that so that's a good way to sort of find spare parts because most of these manufacturers don't sell spare parts to the public so it's not as if you know you had your phone for two years and you can just go on to samsung's website and buy a new camera buy a new sure you might be able to buy a battery but not a new camera not a new card unit and memory chip that's going to be harder to find ok so talk about some of the things that you've got coming up that you're going to crap kokum open because you already got some things in the Hobby you plan to or you know what are some of the things you seem at CES that you're interested in cracking open as well well i'm definitely going to get try and get samsung to give me one of the new all LED TVs oh yeah they might I want me to do that I pinched a 55 inch LED or maybe the 80 inch 88 better we have cracked open a 55 inch ta looked at the hardware inside of that but Sabian LED that was a fitting right samsung LED that's right baby shower maybe shark will send me an 80-inch LCD if you're out there sharp I send me one well we're also going to be taking apart the motorola xyboard their new tablet device we're going to take that one too that's right we're going to be taking apart I think the motorola droid maxx which has a much larger battery in it oh that's like razor the droid razr maxx yes it has a much larger battery in it okay then the droid does which is very important for people that don't like phones like the iPhone but they like phones like the Galaxy Nexus that have a removable battery a lot of people can't get through the day on a single charge so a bigger battery will help we're also going to be taking apart I thank the Asus Transformer Prime okay we've got that learn a convertible tablet another another tablet we're going to taking apart so there's a lot of exciting things coming up in the next few weeks asus zenbook isn't that one that's coming up there that's one of the ulv pcs the Ultrabook that have been popular at the conference some other ultrabooks have been popular here what are some of the ultrabooks you've seen that you know because we crack open some laptops as well what are the ones you're most interested in and you think the audience would would enjoy seeing cracked open well the Samsung the Ultrabook from Samsung we took open one of those a series 9 okay it was a good quality they got some new stuff here acer has a really nice ultrabook that we took apart just last week that should be a you know pretty popular about the new HP was one the wh last HP HP Envy it was really exciting too that's on my list of things I'd like to take apart it has a gorilla glass front panel on not just behind the screen yeah but on the top too so they say it's more scratch resistant they not so sure about shatter resistant but it looks very nice I my doubts about that one okay but what else anything else you've seen here that that you'd like to crack open what are the things at CES that you're most interested in you know learning more about well I really like the Nokia the loo Lumia 900 I can't wait to see that a very nice another phone just like this an LTE phone yeah this AT&T though so it'll be interesting to see the chips inside that and how they differ from this phone that's on the verizon's network and it'll be interesting to see the new just the new TVs the new ultrabooks there are a few more sort of tablets that are kind of interesting and kind of on my radar I did go up two razors booth give a shout out to them yesterday yeah and they have their new blade laptop which is a high-end gaming laptop so if you're in the gaming and if you have twenty eight hundred dollars burning a hole in your pocket this is a 17 inch laptop it has a really unique switchblade interface and so that should be interesting a lot of nice hardware inside there a lot to see that's going to be exciting too okay so bill where can people go to find cracking open and where can they go to find you to learn more about the stuff that you're doing techrepublic com we do a cracking open every week in the cracking open blog we also do a video the describing the device and the teardown and then you can always follow me on twitter at build that Weiler all right so you can also find me on twitter at at jason hider and so thanks for seeing it for letting us come up here and do this we're going to wrap it up so thanks so much for joining us up next we'll be mollywood hosting the cnet women in tech panel you don't want to miss that got some real heavy hitters coming up so stick around for that and we'll see you next time thanks you