Gadgetory

this time around we're gonna test a couple different options of what we can do with big speed to disable the button and I think I have an idea so if you remember for my durability test this bixby button comes out relatively easily right here on the side I think the easiest way to disable bixby would just be to cut off this little niblet down here at the bottom that tip is what's actually pressing the little button inside of the phone you can see right there the crevice itself most of the waterproofing I believe happens inside of the phone and doesn't have much to do with the button since it's relatively sealed off so as you can see once the razor blade cuts that little white niblet off I can take that same button without the niblet and press it back into the phone which lets the button keep its same position inside the phone and keep the same basic level of waterproofing but when you try to press the button it doesn't activate bixby which is what we're after the problem is is that the button is semi loose so it won't hold its position anymore so if you tip the phone down the button will hang loose a little bit but it won't fall completely out of the phone if you want to get crazy you could put a little dab of glue in there and keep the button completely flush all the time with the outer surface of the phone body so even though we've found a solution to permanently disabling bixby there's something else I want to try that jiggly button might bother a couple people this methods a little more extreme but it should be interesting today we're gonna be working with a little bit of gold so I've worked with gold a little bit before you might remember this solid gold Han Solo that I did here with se Needham's a while back this is a little Star Wars Lego piece that we cast it into 14 karat solid gold I'll link the video up in the corner so you can watch that and today we'll be doing the same thing with bixby whether he likes it or not so as you can see when we take the button out of the phone it leaves like a void kind of like a cavity which makes sense because in the past they use gold and silver to fill cavities and teeth and that's basically what we're doing today so how much is this stick of gold if this gold is worth about $250 and it's just a straight bar of gold but we're just gonna use a small section which breaks down to maybe about dollars in gold so we were fabricating a big speed button for the Samsung Note 9 the first step is to make the metal slightly more workable and we do that by annealing which heats up the metal and makes it slightly softer and easier to work with then we can cut the 14-karat gold stick into the basic size that we need and start trimming it down so it'll fit the hole perfectly and tightly fill that cavity so it snug all the way around after the button goes into the phone it's not going to come out so we're gonna make sure that it's polished sanded and looks good before we set it into place inside of the phone we wanted to sit relatively flush with the surface so that it's not sticking up too far or falling down inside we took a bunch of measurements throughout this process to make sure the buttons were the same size as each other and once we got the gold button into the frame of the phone it was so snug we couldn't get it back out again which is exactly what we wanted before we start chopping bixby into bits let's get a definitive answer on whether he has anything to do with water resistance or not and the only way to know for sure is from the inside you can see both the volume and bixby buttons are run off the same sensor ribbon with little square contact pads and when I pull the buttons out you can see some gray rubber blocking the whole inside of the cell phone the button undercarriage contraption is made up of two components one is this metal bracket with the electronic buttons themselves and to the secondary bracket with the rubber pads on the surface that secondary bracket with the rubber pads gets pushed very tightly against the side walls of the phone effectively making a water resistant barrier against liquid coming inside the buttons once that rubber pad is gone we can see the little hole leads directly out of the phone after pushing the gold button out from the inside we can see that the Bigsby cavity has the same design with a little hole underneath the volume buttons themselves don't appear to have any rubber watertight seals around the button so it's pretty safe to say that the gray rubber on the inner metal panel is doing most if not all of the work keeping water out and that gray rubber is held very tightly in place by the dual metal bracket design inside the phone in my opinion the water resistance will remain intact with the buttons gone but I've also never been a person to trust my phone around water in the first place even if it has a water resistant rating water resistance wouldn't be the main worry if you pull out your buttons avoiding your warranty is probably the thing you'll need to take most into consideration before killing off anything Samsung of course could save us all some trouble and allow Bixby to be turned off or remapped but they probably won't so there you have it a solid gold bixby button obviously there's a lot that can go wrong during this process and taking apart your phone probably isn't something Samsung really wants you to do but hypothetically if you wanted a solid gold bixby button do you think that's possible yeah it's definitely possible okay if we decide to not sure if we will yet down in the video description there will be a link if you want a solid gold bixby button for your phone right now it's probably just for the note 9 but we'll see what we can come up with for the for the other phones it's a conversation piece but it works working with precious metals is always an adventure super huge thanks to Joe here at SC Needham's for helping me out with this project and thanks stuff for watching we'll see you around