Gadgetory

welcome to cracking open I'm Jason Heiner with my cohort Bill Detweiler back again to crack open more of the latest technology this time we've got the galaxy s 9 so what are we gonna do with it yeah so we're gonna take it apart we're gonna crack it open like we always do I practice in almost every galaxy I think since the original launch we always love cracking open the Samsung tech so we're really interested to see what's inside the s9 see how hard it is to take apart see how hard it is to repair it very good we learn a lot of things when we do these bill you know from early on from cracking open all really all the most prominent smartphones starting with the the first iPhone blackberries HTC Motorola Samsung devices we've packed open a lot and I remember early on we would see some of these devices and crack them open and you could tell a lot about a company by the inside of their devices and there were some devices that you could tell they were really jury-rigged and you would look at him and say oh my gosh look they've taped up these wires they've got stuff you know it's a mess in here and very early on when samsung started making smart phones you I remember you saying to me these devices are design so well all the ways happen I mean Samsung has always been a hardware coming I've always been an engineering based company and so it was always a pleasure to take them apart now the only thing that is not a pleasure these days on the other devices is all the adhesive that goes into it so as everybody can see we're using a heat gun here and we're actually applying heat to the back of the plastic cover that's how we're gonna get into the s9 this has been sort of the standard way that we take these apart for several years now with several versions and we're also gonna use sort of a modified guitar pick or another thin plastic tool yep to wedge between the back cover here and the edge of the the frame the main body here so that we can get into the end of the phone and so I after I've heated up the adhesive here there a couple different ways to do this but we like the heat gun we're gonna try and slide this in here and in all fairness because we didn't want this video to be an hour and a half long we precooked this a little bit obviously it has a battery inside but we've already pre loose the back so we can get straight into cracking open so cooking shows where they make all the ingredients and then they pull it out of the oven that's right so what we're gonna do is we're gonna slide the pic in you can see how easy to slides around normally this would not do this but you've already softened this already soften the adhesive up here so that makes things a lot easier when it comes to taking these apart you do want to be very careful on this there is a flexible cable it's inside near the cameras okay that we'll see when we take this apart that we don't want to cut through so you really only need to insert these you know just a quarter-inch not even that much few millimeters inside the device to cut through the adhesive that's around the edge of the device you know that's what helps keep the dust out of the device that's what helps keep the moisture and water out of the device and so that's why they use adhesive instead of screws so it used to be screws right all these device screws it used to be you could pop it loose mechanical connections Clips snaps but now it's adhesive again is it because of everything being so thin idiots a lot of it's because for the IPS and the thinness you really want to make sure that there is it you can't get the dust and you can't get the moisture in and people want everything to be thin so you need smaller screws you need fewer mechanical connectors got as we as we lift this off here I'm going to lift this up you can kind of see if I tilt this up I don't know if we can get a close-in shot there you can kind of see the cable that connects the back plate here to the to the motherboard that's underneath another frame we're only real careful cuz you want to tell this on nectar you could really tear it that's right yeah I mean it's designed to be popped loose but we definitely don't want to tear it know we crack these things open so you don't have to but bill has a great track record you're putting 99% of the things that we crack open we actually put back together again and because we have this idea that we you're gonna do it you know we want to do it in a way that if you were having to crack something open to repair it or to learn from that you can still use that's right we don't want to destroy the devices and so I've separated the back panel from the rest of the body of the frame or the phone here and this cable here is actually for the fingerprint scanner that's on the back okay so um you know oddly if you were going to replace this you could probably you might be able to remove the fingerprint scanner on the back and just replace that okay it might come as a single part it's you know manufacturers release replacement parts in different ways and the vendors that actually make replacement parts come in different ways but it's nice to see that if the fingerprint scanner gets broken you don't have to replace the whole phone right you can yeah replace that is an individual component it's always been something not like about Samsung they really componentize their devices so that you can repair that a little more easily and importantly they did move that fingerprint scanner on the previous devices it was over to the side here a very awkward and on the note on the previous Samsung having moved it under it's better it's it's like you know naturally you tend to put your finger there it's not as nice as the you know Nexus devices the pixel devices where it has the bigger you know circle but it is easier than the Samsung Galaxy S 9 or the the note 8 yeah now the other so we're gonna go ahead and start taking out the screws that are inside of this one thing I also like about Samsung devices once you get into them they're usually the same you know their standard Philips screws you need a really small screwdriver like we're using here either a Philips like double zero or triple zero and you can see inside the phone before I take start taking off the screws we can see there are a lot of screws but they're all going to be Phillips screws and I would bet I bet they're all about the same length okay so we'll be able to easily sort of put these screws back together and put them back together without having to know exactly where they go so we can't see the board's yet the circuit boards that are inside of this all we can do because it's covered by this sort of internal this mid frame here now this appears to have the wireless charging so the induction coil on it right here yeah so we'll need to move in the battery we can see peeking out behind it we'll need to remove this to actually get down into the battery sometimes these things might have the near-field communication built into them but everyone you know when they have alarms charging they have that so I'll go ahead and start removing these little screws here no pentalobe screws which is great and and no different sizes so we run into with especially some of the Apple devices they'll have multiple different kinds of screws they'll have different lengths though heavy wind off still you know we'll stand off at the screws yeah go into that then you have to use a separate screwdriver to take apart that is one thing I really do like about samsung devices very nice so one of the things that we've been doing you know audience who've watched these before knows as we've been doing these for a long time some of the first devices that we cracked open back in 2006 were Xbox 360 the one of the early iPods and so you've been doing these things always with this look of what can we learn from the technology what we can learn about maybe what chips are in there that we may not know about as well as you know what can we learn about you know not only the repair ability but also potentially the durability sometimes even these companies will put technology in there that's not activated and so there are times when we learn you know that there are chips in there that are not feature part of the feature set and so that tells you something about a future feature they might enable or potentially you know a feature in a future device so there are lots of things that we learn about when it comes to cracking these devices open and we always try to do it we've said it multiple times we always try to do these with an air of not destroying the device that the being able to put them back together in fact you know like you said we we do that on a fairly regular basis I think the only thing that we ever really broke there are a few things that we had to take apart and had to destroy to take them apart if you've already watched CES was it was 2016 well yeah actually or 2017 where we cut apart a sphero bb-8 toy and to use the Dremel on that yeah poor bb-8 but like when you pull out the dremel and have to you know saw through something though every once in a while that's fun I'll do that with maybe a hundred dollar toy I'm not gonna do it with a thousand dollar phone yeah and that's the other one so why do you care about repairing a smartphone well because they're so expensive these days because people keep them for so many years it's really important that you know people are gonna trash these maybe every year yeah so it's important that they be repairable that people understand hey look this is the device that gonna have for a while I'm gonna keep it for a while and I want to be able to either take it back into the manufacturer and have them repaired or I want to be able to take it to a third-party repair store and know that hey the speaker goes bad hey yeah the port one of the charging port stops working hey I drop it I cracked the screen you know what's gonna you know where can I get it fixed how much is it gonna cost me and you know because I'm in what says the investment right yeah what's involved and hopefully this these videos help you to be better informed so if your speaker goes out or if you have a cracked screen you know you can understand and also somebody can't pull one over on you and say like oh when you put through the screen I have to take everything apart and the motherboard and pull out the battery and you can say well no actually I watched the cracking open and saw that in fact all you have to do is you know X Y Z so this is to help you be more informed about the devices that you own and devices in general so that you can be you know an informed consumer yeah yeah and informed about tech so we've already taken out all the screws I'm not sure whether I had to take out all the screws to actually remove this little mid-play but we've taken out all the screws just to be safe now we're gonna kind of gently cuz this is really thin right now wires in there so we're gonna be really gentle and do our best to kind of using our little guitar picks here to pry this open without cracking anything without breaking anything cuz when you're doing this we I haven't taken this apart before like I said I did pre kuk the back a little bit just so it would be a little easier to take apart but we haven't taken this apart before so I'm not exactly sure how everything comes apart now there we go so now we can lift this off here like that and then we have the sort of this mid frame which contains some electronics now you might think yeah you just look at this if you haven't watched the video Oh what is this is it just something I can throw away or something no it's not this actually contains important components that you can't just sort of toss and throw away other than just the the wireless charging possible you can see that it looks like the yeah it looks like the charging coil is here on that your contacts are here so we'll set that aside right there and we get our first sort of real look into the device and what always fascinated me is that how to layout has change you were talking about sort of the construction we to see really thick sort of wires in these we used to see tape some of these devices here in these devices now everything is flat almost these days there's very few mechanical connectors everything is very well laid out it's compact you know they try to pack as much tech into these devices as possible the other thing to sort of notice on all these devices when you look inside we can see the main system board here this is going to be our port and our speaker assembly down at the bottom is the battery right you can see how much yes the battery really takes up inside the devices and and that's important when you think about you know we want these devices to last a really long time yeah and so it's important that you have you know it takes a sizeable battery to do that right and there's a lot of you know everybody remembers the old you know the the Samsung Galaxy Note controversy of course with with battery batteries yeah and it's understandable when you're trying to cram so much capacity so much power in such a small space you know it's gonna get hot if you don't dissipate the peak heat well enough it causes problems if you don't engineer if the battery swells and you have a small space if you have a poor manufacturing in the battery you just get a batch of bad batteries and you are yep tested um all of those I'm not saying any one of those contributed to the Samsung to the no problems but you know if those are all problems that occur because of these tight tolerances that are inside these devices now one of the things that we're going to do is I'm gonna make an attempt to actually remove the battery it is actually glued down so I'm not sure whether or not we're gonna be able to do that but even if we can't we're gonna remove the circuit board and we're gonna remove the speaker assembly okay without removing the battery you know the batteries do have adhesive on the back of them some batteries like the iPad or the iPhone have a tab that you can pull sometimes and will help like a the strips that you put on a wall okay and kind of remove those Samsung does not and so we could try and heat it but we might we might have to we might I don't want to avoid setting the battery on fire and eating it too much or puncturing it so I might leave it connected to the frame the other thing you notice the first thing I always do when I take devices apart is I disconnect the battery what I don't want I don't want power throwing flowing through the circuits I don't want to touch it even with something that we say is an esd-safe tool yeah we want to avoid any kind of short-circuit any kind of static discharge we don't want to damage the fragile circuits inside this so we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna see and you often talk about being very careful with the battery it's one of the areas you need to be most careful with you don't want to puncture it with a screwdriver you don't want to you know be stabbing it or have metal devices that you're using to you know pop that thing out you don't because that's when you know you could have safely hissed have a have a fire right sparks a couple years ago we cracked open the Apple pencil the scene at stage yeah yes we actually had smoke we did spark that fun on stage but you know we were kind of worried about the fire marshal when I first moved here I popped this off and you can see removing the front facing facing camera yeah like the ambient light sensor here so we're going to remove that and decide it just pops loose we can see the other the rear camera here at the back you can see the the earphones piece the speaker right there this is actually a vibration motor for the yeah it's the vibration right there no it's it's what makes it vibrate in your pocket so we're gonna try moving here populist we're gonna pop off all the little cords yeah so the connectors here we just want to be real careful we do not want to break any of the cords if I were to damage the battery to cut that cord that wouldn't be that much of a kneel that much of a problem to replace but if I break one of the circuits on the motherboard I mean it's really hard to solder these really small components the whole thing is probably just trashed me not the whole phone but the circuit board yeah is is is is gone at that point so what we're gonna do is we're gonna like pop this off here we're gonna try and I'm gonna see if I can get done so this device one thing to note that get you know one of the big things about the s9 and the s9 plus with its dual camera is that Samsung has built into this the camera itself has a processor now and so that processor is what it's doing to do that super slow-mo you may have seen some of the promos about that 960 frames per second really really slow mo but it also is what enables it to do some some low-light photography which of course if you've worked with smartphones you know is the worst feature in smartphones is that low-light photography and so this device what it does is it can take three photos and three exposures and then it can use that to make a better low-light photo you know one of the big problems with low-light photos is noise they're very grainy and so the AI so the process are attached to the the camera is what enables it to do that so that's one of the most important things about this device and we can see Bill is talking about how up near the camera here there's a lot of technology in there and one of those things is is a new feature in this phone which is a processor just attached to the camera so in the past you had processors just attached to maybe the wireless chips you had the processors that were obviously graphics processors that were separate this one has its own camera processor yeah I'm being very careful here I don't see any other screws but even the motherboards are usually held in pretty tight you know yeah and so I want to be real careful when I pop this loose I think I am gonna try I am gonna be able to remove this without getting the battery which is what I want to do I don't want to puncture the battery I don't want to do anything that could damage the battery start a fire yeah the fire department to show up but you do have to be really kind of careful and that's what you owe you see this is why I missed a screw so if you look right here it's a silver colored screw and it's holding it's right next to the device and so that screw was preventing me from removing the motherboard and I just kept going and just kept forcing it and just kept trying to bend it would you mind a crack I might've cracks on board the chin now if I remove the screw let's see what happens I am there it goes right of Samsung devices you know I can just lift and these are among the most spelt devices on the market you know I just came back from mobile world Congress and it was interesting to compare some of the competitors have come out now with their own you know bezel list smartphones and they compared to some of these Samsung devices they really do feel like you know almost like a brick comparatively yeah they have they have really outdone everybody in terms of the thinness and sort of the spell feel of their phones that's what they're best at you know they've had some other challenges this device is trying to match Apple in terms of an emoji interesting ly enough hasn't done real well with that you know that avatars they've gotten some animo agree and and then let's just showing my age you also have the fact that they're trying to do the face facial recognition scanner they haven't done that integrate that is that quite as well on the facial recognition but they make an incredibly spell device yeah and so here we were after removing that last screw that eluded me and actually broke one of my cardinal rules I should have removed the SIM card slot or the SD card slot here but I did not so that pulled out that was holding the the circuit board in we have the circuit board here our little l-shaped circuit board of the rear-facing camera on that we talked about as we've talked about in kind of some of our previous I'm gonna remove the camera if we come over to the back the camera usually is held on with a little connector here that's just pressure fit there's a snaps on so very good that like that and the camera should again that's all loose probably their most advanced feature the most advanced new feature in this phone is the camera with some of that intelligence that AI built-in that's gonna let you take low-light photos it's gonna do the nine hundred and sixty frames per second super slow-mo which makes for great demos and really fun but that low-light camera is probably what's gonna be the best now seen it in its test it had some mixed results with the with the low-light camera so this is the first time that it's it's trying to do to do that it does have a doesn't do a lower aperture as well so there's some physical attributes of the camera but it is a step forward but there's still work to do as you can see when you when you read the scene it you on this there's our little camera right there and again is this is nice when cameras and phones are most phones are like this their component has so if the camera graphs you can replace the camera without having to replace the main circuit board without having to replace two batteries not having to replace obviously the screen on this and it's usually the screen on honestly Oh or they assembly for the screen that's the most expensive part on okay on these phones the most offensive single part yeah the process oh yeah even more than the process of the processor compared to the phone or the screen actually is fairly cheap fairly reasonable okay we've got the camera separate the rear facing camera got the front facing camera we've got actually the rear speaker assembly here we took that off and we've got the mainboard out now I'm gonna look real close at the mainboard and I'm gonna look for the chips that are on the board I'm gonna look the chips on the board to the processor the mid chips the Wi-Fi the radios all of that they're underneath these silver screens mote these silver shields most of these are yeah EMI RF shields they help filter out electromagnetic interference protect the chips and sometimes they're attached to the circuit board with clips they just snap on yeah other times they're soldered to the boards now yeah they're soldered to the boards then the only way to get them apart is actually to cut them or to desolder then I don't want to do that in this case we ought to put this phone back together right we want to make sure that it works so I hate to if I cut these off it'll basically damage it beyond repair which is not what I want to do yeah so we're gonna take a metal tool I'm gonna try to pop these loose just to see if I can get something under them yeah looks like they're soldered together so we might have to call it a day with there might be as far as far as I can go and on the board doesn't mean we can't look at some of the other components in there it just means it might be as far as I can get it yeah I just I'm a little concerned I want to make sure that I don't damage any other parts on the motherboard there are places you know there are other people who will actually sort of tear the devices all the way down to the bare to the bare components and I love that I'll it's a great source of information the people that do that yeah but we always try to do this with it with the idea of putting them back together like I said so yeah I don't want to do that on this case now what is we can tell you we can say actually what is behind here we do know great specs on the phones you know when it first came out the iPhone first came out and some of the early iPods first came out we didn't necessarily know exactly what we're on these devices but now all the manufacturers release that information put it everywhere so it's real easy to sort of find what the hardware is on these devices and so for example we know that this has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor we know that it has 64 gigs this one is a 64 gigs of storage and yet the flash we know that it has a qualcomm acoustic audio processing chip we know that it has a maximum PMI C on it the power management IC we know a lot about the hardware that's inside these devices I'll be doing without having to sort of destroy them to find that out now the last thing I'm gonna try to take the last thing we're going to try and take off one of the things that often gets damaged on these devices beyond the battery just like said beyond the battery wearing down you know we've had battery gate with the iPhone and batteries these lithium-ion batteries are only good for a certain number of charging cycles recharging cycles and so they do wear out after a while usually you know most people don't notice it within the normal lifespan of the phone but some people do weigh out the Samsung the problem they had in the note 7 they you know here to have put that behind them they said that they have a number of checks in place that's enabling them to QA these devices so that they're not gonna have that problem we haven't seen follow-up devices we haven't seen anyone so as long as the company sort of learned from those kind of mistakes I think there were some issues with the tolerances and the battery and so it's we haven't seen that issue and I'm not necessarily I'm not concerned about that as long as you're not puncturing these batteries as long as they're not doing anything bad to them we haven't had any reports of issues with this with the new phones you know hopefully that will continue to be the case but so we're gonna remove another part what I was talking about that gets damaged a lot are the ports you know you're always connect things to the porch are using charger you're connecting your headphones or plugging them in and out and so these can get drunk in them they can get broken you can break connectors inside of them it's my favorite feature of this the headphone jack that's my favorite feature device you still like the old three-and-a-half millimeter headphone jack I do alright but you can't these are componentized so basically if we remove these sort of these small little cables here we removed a couple screws I'm gonna pop loose a few connectors here at the bottom and we should be able to remove let's see if we can get it out you were just talking about a headphone jack yep so we're gonna try and see if I can't take the headphone jack out a little bit you know a lot of these devices a lot of the manufacturers have removed the headphone jack and it's it's not part of the pixel it's not my part the iPhone of course you know I'll be gentle you might hear that you do I mean not forcing it is what has enabled you to be able to put so many of these devices back together um the other thing you mentioned the Qualcomm 845 processor that really is a desktop-class processor that's what I need with these devices you know these devices run as fast as computers now and the Samsung decks as as many of you may know is the is what enables you to take this device and plug in a mouse a monitor and a keyboard and use this as a desktop computer and with this processor it's really fast enough now up to do that and save something's kind of teased in the future it's likely that it will build that into its monitors so you'll be able to take a Samsung phone connect it to a Samsung monitor and that monitor can have a mouse you know and a keyboard attached and you'll be able to to simply use it as you use one device as your computer yeah and the nice thing about that from an enterprise standpoint from from a business standpoint is that you know all of this the device the information on this device the data on this device is locked down according to company policies right so a lot of our users on TechRepublic really care a lot about that the fewer number of devices you have to manage the better chance you have of securing your data and so that's a very good thing also Samsung Knox is a nice feature that allows you to separate your work data from your your personal data so those are features that do matter with this device and if you think about even into the future this is not a 5g device but it can do gigabit LTE and if you're thinking in the future this year you know this device has a desktop class processor next year the galaxy s 10 we're expecting will have 5g in it that can get up to do two gigabits per second of coverage so of a speed and so you're talking twice as fast as Google Fiber so now you're talking about a phone that's as fast as a computer on this as powerful as a computer and it's as fast in terms of its connectivity as the fastest computer that you have connection that you have in your home or in your business so these devices really are becoming the center of the universe in many cases and so we're gonna we're likely to see that continue in this device is an interesting step in that direction definitely and we can see we have removed the we removed the threat your favorite component yeah headphone jack right here we have your headphone jack there we go we've also removed sort of these little component clusters we have mounted on separate little circuit boards PCBs connected with these flat cables here we have like the port for the bottom the charging port yep yes we have a microphone there and so you see that a lot these component has parts that you can remove and replace that out having to replace the whole phone now we're gonna sort of call it a day on the teardown here we could like that we could keep going I could try and pry this battery loose there's nothing really to see behind the battery okay so we're just we're not gonna worry about that left on the frame of course is the screen and like I said that's the most expensive component if you were to crack the screen you know how it gets replace depends on the manufacturer some fun you know some manufacturers replace it all as one unit some manufacturers will sell you just or aftermarket component vendors will sell you just the screen itself you try to remove the glass you know but usually they're sold as sort of the unit that you replaced the whole thing that's gonna be the most expensive part the battery is essentially adhesive onto the back of that yeah there's this case here right and there there may be there's probably a fit there's a film behind the screen okay there's some protection behind it some shielding behind the screen here and the battery will actually be adhesive to those little the plastic sort of mid frame here this little frame so yeah so Kerry yeah that's kind of it you're still some components like we said connected to the you know connected to the body and we're going to leave those connected the body not necessarily worry about taking them apart because again we want to put it back together we want to put it back together in working order and not have to worry about trashing all right thanks Bill good stuff that is the galaxy s 9 if you've got other tech you'd like to see us tear down new tech hole tech anything in between leave us a note in the comments we're always looking for the next thing to tear down that's it for cracking open thanks for watching we'll see you next time