Gadgetory

hey welcome to CNET's cracking open I'm Jason Heiner with bill Detweiller today we're here to crack open the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 one of the most anticipated high-end Android devices of the year this device looks a lot like last year's note 8 on the outside but it has a lot of upgrades to the inside including the processor the battery and much more it also has the Bluetooth s-pen which acts like a remote control and has a number of interesting features and of course it was the first Android phone to get fortnight so bill tell us a little bit more about why we're so excited to crack this one open yeah so we're really excited about this one because of all the hardware advancements it'll be really nice to see the new Qualcomm 845 processor yes it'll also be really cool to see the higher capacity battery you know it's got this four thousand milliamp hour battery it's like a 15 watt hour battery I'd like to see just how large that is compared to previous versions also I've always been impressed with Samsung's engineering now the note 7 sort of notwithstanding the battery issues there but I've been cracking open samsung devices for over a decade and inside the devices they're usually easy to take apart they use standard size Phillips screws all most of the time and so we're expecting this to kind of be a pleasure to take apart so just really excited to get started excellent so what are we gonna do to crack this one open what we're gonna do is we're going to use a heat gun now a big gun that's right this one allows me to control the heat and control the speed of the fan now you have to be careful with this these will get very hot you know these are designed to remove paint um so you have to make sure that you have it set low enough that we do not melt the plastic and that we don't dam you know and we don't damage the internal components either so you know with that let's go ahead let's get started all right so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna remove the SIM card or the SIM card holder and then we're gonna go ahead turn our heat gun on and I'm gonna make sure that it doesn't get too hot so that we don't melt the plastic or damage the internal components now as I heat this up if you've ever watched our cracking open videos you'll notice that I don't usually wear an anti-static or ESD wrist strap and you know generally that's a good thing that you want to do since we're not necessarily concerned as much about damaging the internal components and I'm super careful about touching metal inside the device or touching the contacts and I use ESD safe tools most of the time when I'm doing the delicate work on the circuit boards I don't usually wear one I would highly recommend that you do if you were working on someone else's hardware or even your own while we're heating the back of this up we're also going to apply a suction cup here that will help us pull up on the back cover and maybe make it a little easier for us to get a one of our thin prime tools inside the device we're gonna be very very careful as we work our way around the edge of the back cover there will be a thin cable that connects the fingerprint sensor on the back panel to the circuit board and we don't want to damage that and that's what happens if you put a little bit too much pressure on these you managed to crack the back cover luckily when this happens it won't affect the functioning of the phone on the internals and will be able to order a back cover replacement and put it on there but it sometimes happens one of the things that's changed over the years is that as the devices have gotten increasingly more resistant to dust and to water they've also gotten increasingly more difficult to actually take apart and we can lift it off like that it looks like actually the this is the cable that I wanted to try not to break this is the fingerprint a sensor here so so bill we're back and I see that we've got a first casualty of our early cracking open here what happened on you know we always try to take these devices apart on doing a way that lets us put them back together again in one hand at other times you've broke it so actually broking something beyond repair yes so in my haste to try to get the back off especially when we're doing it on camera I applied a little bit too much force and we cracked the back panel now this won't affect the functioning of the phone it won't affect even the fingerprint sensor which is attached to the back of that okay I don't there but still it's a cosmetic issue could be a safety issue so we'll order a new back panel from Samsung we'll put it on the phone and you'll never be the wiser very good so what are you gonna do next with the device yeah so what we're really interested in seeing inside the device we talked about the battery we talked about the logic board which will be behind here and what what I always enjoy about taking apart Samsung devices is they're pretty easy to take apart once you get inside these are standing Philips either double zero or triple zero screw so it shouldn't be a problem to remove those we will have to be mindful again of the adhesive that's holding on like these are the NFC or the charging coils here I suspect on the back so we'll have to be careful not to damage those and then you'll have a speaker in your port assembly down at the bottom that will want to make sure to take out very carefully as well very good all right let's keep going here so now that we're inside the phone we can see a better picture of the layout we can see the system board here along the side and here at the top we can see the cameras and we can see the entire battery we can also see the sleeve for the S pin here we're gonna have two looks like there's a few more screws and several connectors that we'll need to detach before we can go any further and whenever I'm doing this I always like to make sure that we detached as soon as I can the battery that'll prevent power from flowing through the circuits and make things a little safer to disconnect sometimes when you do detach the connectors you can actually remove the components this is the 8 megapixel I believe front facing camera now I think what we can do is with all the cables disconnected we're actually going to end all the screws removed we're actually going to go ahead and remove the circuit board without removing the battery first battery is going to be glued to the body here and so I'm going to leave that in if I can I have to be very gentle when you lift this out not to tear you the cables and there we go the remaining components we're going to try and remove are the three and a half millimeter headphone jack and in the USB port at the bottom there's the USB port and then here is the three-and-a-half millimeter headphone jack Jason's favorite part turning our attention to the main system board we're going to go ahead and remove the camera assembly from the back all right so bill you've got the Galaxy Note nine apart tell us what we're looking at yeah so this was a challenging teardown to get inside but once they were inside it's fairly typical of these devices you know on the body we left some of the components still attached because they're there they're glued to the to the body and I didn't want to damage them removing them we have the vibration mode or we left the battery and then we left the front facing speaker also attached to the body there one of the things that's really interesting the heat pipe here that's beside the battery is bigger than we've seen on previous phones and maybe a nod to the more powerful processor speaking of the processors we unfortunately can't see them yeah the main system board the metal shields that cover the chips are soldered to the board I don't want to remove those because doing so will likely damage the board's beyond repair we do want to put these back together now we do know because of the specs that Samsung has published that it either has eight gigs or six gigs of RAM and either has 128 or 512 gigs of storage and of course we know it has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor hidden under here too we can also see the pair of 12 megapixel cameras there's the 8 megapixel front camera we have the USBC connector here your favorite the three and a half inch headphone jack and then we have the speaker assembly here and then the NFC or the charging coils yep here so even without taking the shields off the circuit or the main circuit board we still have a good sense of what's inside the device and the very cool thing is with that upgraded top version that has 512 gigs of storage you can also then add it has the expandable storage you can add the 512 gig SD card and this becomes the first terabyte storage media and of course the first Android phone with fortnight alright that's it for the samsung galaxy note 9 if you have other devices you'd like to see us crack open please let us know post in the comments on SEANET or on youtube and we will be happy to take a look we're always looking for good stuff that we can crack open learn from and share it with you so that's it for build Dettwiler I'm Jason Heiner thanks for tuning in see you next time