Gadgetory

welcome to CNN and tech republics cracking open where we take apart the latest tech show you what's inside I'm Bill Detweiler and today I'm joined by CNET's very own Aaron Carson here and Aaron has something special for us what do you have Aaron I do so I have a samsung galaxy s6 but it's not just a regular one okay this guy has spent two months waterlogged in the mud and water in the bay off Sausalito California Wow okay well this is actually a co-worker's phone right and so area is gonna tell us the whole story while I'm taking it apart but we thought this would be a really cool opportunity to show everybody what actually happens to one of these devices when they sit underwater and this one sat under saltwater right for two months and it was just by chance that we found the thing or our co-worker found the thing afterwards so show everybody on the outside maybe what it kind of looks like here can we see yes so it's it's looking pretty grody it looks like we have some corrosion around the sides here at the bottom kind of at the top top and on the on the side it really starts to look like something you might say from a ship let's go ahead and get started let's see what we can do with this thing so we have to go in through the back of this phone we'll remove the plate off of the back there's some adhesive that holds it on you can use a lot of different methods to heat this up to heat the adhesive and loosen it up we're gonna use our handy dandy heat gun turned on low so while I'm doing this Aaron once you tell us so what happened with this phone whose was it and how did they lose it and how do they get it back so this phone used to belong to FINA senior producer Andy Altman and like any good house story it starts with the house though he has a friend who has a houseboat in Sausalito and a bunch of them we're gonna go ride their bikes and so this one day he had the phone in the pocket of his riding jersey and it just bounced out of his pocket while he was walking at the dock and as you might imagine he just sort of looked at the water and it was like well I I guess I'm not gonna see that again but about two months later during low tide at his friend actually texted him and was like I found your phone Wow so they they fished it out and here we are and he tried to turn it back on obviously it didn't work right we're not really concerned about breaking his phone we're not gonna try to repair this phone this phone is toast having spent two months in salt water here in the bay so we're gonna he's not counting on getting this back right so we don't have to be as gentle with this device as we normally would so I'm gonna kick the heat up a little bit here on our he's gone you can use a hairdryer to do this when you're working with adhesive if you have a heat gun with an adjustable heat setting you can use that we just want to try and take the back off without breaking it most people you know lose these in the bathroom or Lucy's in the washer or especially with newer phones you know you there's a chance that those are actually more for water you know resistant than perhaps they used to be in years past right yeah another really common theme and you you sort of alluded to this is bathroom horror stories people have their phone in there and it does not meet a good end I mean everybody takes their phone to the restroom these days right it's just like the newspaper of old or a book or old or magazine everybody takes their phones but you know you definitely have to be careful all right so we managed to get the back off of this fairly easily use a little bit of heat from our heat gun and we'll pull the back off and now we can kind of see what's inside it ooh that's pretty a lot of corrosion there you can see a lot of the damage here that we have to the phone a lot of the corrosion you see it looks like even maybe some of the screws here have a little bit of rust on them let's see if we can't get these out and see what we can find inside luckily inside these Samsung phones there's all Phillips screws right so it makes it a little easier to take them apart that if it's a you know they have special special tamper resistant screws that's one of my favorite things about Samsung phones is that they do use stay in screws once you get inside okay so we've got to back off we have got the I think all the screws off that I can see and what we're gonna do is I'm gonna try to there's a cover on the back that covers the batteries it covers the circuit boards and so we're gonna try and remove that here as best we can and then get to some of the circuits underneath it definitely looks like and I probably should be let's try this one so there's some corrosion and crud we'll call that's our official term crud inside I mean it looks like the I don't know the battery doesn't look puncture but it looks like we definitely have some corrosion in there so if you're going to do this yourself I mean I don't recommend doing this at this point it probably just needs to be recycled get what data you can off of it sit if it's got pictures or anything you really need on it you really want send it away to a data recovery company you know see what they can do make sure I have all the the screws undone I think we do here so let's see if I can't pry the body off the body comes off like this this is gonna stick together a little bit here even after being in saltwater for months there's still plenty of adhesive on this and this is the all right you see the battery there if I can't we can hear some crunchiness this is really unusual here no sea life so far inside this you never couldn't tell I guess I guess there we go kind of popped it loose so we can see as we separate the body from the assembly here there are some wires in here that are connecting the back panel to the assembly here I'm going to try and pop those loose be real gentle here that hold the camera there we go now here there we go so we can kind of see inside the phone now oh that was that's an issue what was holding the case on I don't know if we can see this here this is the SIM card and the door had kind of stuck shut and so it's metal that holds the the SIM card in place and so that was holding the case in I should have removed there we go I should have removed that first but we did now all right so SIM cards out now we can see all of our dust and debris here we see all the corrosion we can see what's sitting in salt water for two months actually does to the phone that definitely looks worse than any be inside of any phone I've seen it's pretty bad we're gonna go ahead and I'm gonna try and disconnect the battery here just connect everything that's underneath the battery he would get the battery we'll go ahead and pop the battery out the battery it's not oh yeah there's more more dust more grit more debris in there and I'm not sure what in here is actually corrosion because it was in salt water some of that might be you know sea salt from the from the west coast of the u.s. here miscellaneous dirt dust you never know I don't see any small sea creatures but you know it would be pretty hard for that that is for the best so we're gonna pop off the outside camera here oh there goes so there's the there's the front-facing camera let's see if we can't pop loose this is the speaker here the front facing speaker wow this is all dusty man it's crunchy it's it's it's just there's dust and debris all over the place oh so there's our yeah this is everywhere you can see the corrosion on the contacts here you can see let's see if we can't I wanna see the chips that's what we really want to get to if I can get them underneath the underneath the metal shields here ooh yeah more wipes more white crusty stuff we can see this stuff I mean let's let's let's pull this off last connector oh there we go alright so this would would be the display assembly here and we can still see how one of the circuit boards connected to the bottom of that I'm gonna leave that there this has the ports on it the headphone jack and then the USB port there on the bottom you have the vibration we can see our little vibration motor there so and in the display let's see what seawater has done for two months - well the camera nothing nothing yeah that's right nothing good alright so there's a camera yeah I'm surprised look at the camera there you know it actually you know you would think that the sea water would get inside these little crevices and the camera and stop but it actually the camera seemed to be fairly well protected inside you know inside its little housing here on part of the case so I don't see a ton of you know I don't know if this camera would actually work again if you plugged it if you could connect it up to something but it might I don't know let's see if we can't get the I want to take off the EMI EMF shields here these are these electromagnetic interference shields that are put on top of the the main chips oh yeah there's water inside there and there's a couple of them here we can see one of the things that meat is easier is the tape the adhesive the salt water and exposure to moisture has definitely made that a little bit easier to pop through you know so here we have the circuit board the main circuit board inside are damaged galaxy s6 you can see the processor here you can see our our RAM chip our storage chips here and they're just they're toast now you know could a data recovery company take this phone D saw to the chip a storage chip from the motherboard and possibly get material off of it that off of it the answer is yes maybe if there's not too much physical degradation to the chip they can disorder these from the board and pull the data off and then maybe recover it I think it would long shot in this case it also be pretty expensive to do that but not impossible so there you have it you have a teardown of a water log phone that has been in salt water for two months lots of lots and lots of dust lots of salt lots of corrosion you know I'll probably have some disease on my hands from all this or chemical burns and we'll be okay all right well that does it for this edition of cracking open for all of our episodes be sure to check out Cena's YouTube channel and check out tech for a public where you can find photos and a full tour tear down description of this cracking over