Gadgetory

with its beautiful display and stylish design the galaxy s3 looks great on the outside but what about on the inside let's find out I'm Bill Detweiler and this is cracking open from a teardown and repair standpoint the s3 has both positives and negatives on the plus side it's polycarbonate case is ridiculously easy to open thanks to its user replaceable NFC capable battery the back cover just pops off and after removing a few Phillips screws I detach the motherboard cover using just my fingers the headphone jack and speaker assembly came out just as easily another positive is the motherboards connector placement unlike the HTC One X most of the s3s connectors are located on the side of the motherboard that faces the phone's back cover now this makes the board easy to remove and reinstall unfortunately while getting to most of the internal components is a snap replacing them may be a bit more complicated some components such as the volume buttons earpiece and service light appear to be joined together with a single ribbon cable if you replace one you'll probably need to replace them all also most of the internal ribbon cables are glued to the internal frame if you ever need to replace the frame it would be very difficult to remove all the attached components without damaging them now if you're wondering why you'd ever need to replace the frame that brings me to my biggest complaint about the phone's construction the front panel display and frame are all sandwiched together and held in place with extremely strong adhesive if you crack the display or the front panel which happens a lot you'll likely have to replace the whole assembly or just get a new phone now that we've discussed the pros and cons of the s3s construction let's take a tour around the phone's internal hardware unlike the international s3 which has a quad-core Samsung Exynos processor the US version like this t-mobile unit have a 1.5 gigahertz dual-core Qualcomm s4 chip shown here mounted under the 2gig Jim they also have either 16 or 32 gigs of on-board storage a micro SD card slot an 8 megapixel rear-facing camera 1.9 megapixel front facing camera and a 4.8 inch HD Super AMOLED display as of this taping t-mobile's version of the samsung galaxy s3 is available for $1.99 with a two-year contract and despite my complaints about its repair ability it's a solid Android phone with top-shelf hardware and a highly competitive price for more information on the phone software real-world performance and battery life test results check out Jessica dole quartz full CNET review and to see more teardown photos and read my full hardware analysis go to TechRepublic comm forward slash cracking open I'm Bill Detweiler thanks for watching