Gadgetory

Today we'll be taking apart the Blackview Max 1 – the $400 Android smartphone with a builtin 720p laser projector. The smartphone can broadcast whatever is on your phone screen onto a wall or ceiling. Phones are getting pretty cool. Turns out Samsung had an Android projector phone that came out about 7 years ago called the Galaxy Beam, so the technology isn't entirely new, but it is improving. Today we're going to see what it looks like from the inside. Let's get started. [Intro] Taking apart the Blackview Max 1 is pretty straightforward. Glass backed smartphones are kind of all built the same. Heat softens the adhesive surrounding the back glass, and then my handy dandy razor blade can slip it's way between the glass and the metal frame. It's a tight fit. Is there a safer way to do this? Probably. Once the adhesive is cut all the way around the outside, I can lift the back glass up and away from the frame, exposing what very well could be the most boring looking clear phone of all time. I'll lift up the NCF pad and then pull away the black tape over the black plastics, revealing 17 normal Phillips head screws surrounding the singular black plastic chunk. Before the large plastic panel can be removed, strangely enough, we have to take off the camera lens. This singular camera protector is made from glass and machined aluminum and is also covering up the fingerprint scanner and dual tone LED flash ribbons – both of which need to be peeled off the back panel before it can be lifted up and pulled away from the phone. Which then gets us our first look inside. We can see the large silver laser projector box up at the top. I'll take that out in a second. The main rear camera is a 16 megapixel with no optical image stabilization. I'll unplug the battery and the rear NFC pad and lucky for us, even without any magic pull tabs, the whole battery can come out of the frame pretty easily. Nice of Blackview to make it removable. It is a 4680milliamp hour and can supposedly run that top projector for about 5 hours. I'll unclip the bottom extension ribbon and two more ribbons up at the top, each unsnapping like little Legos. And then I'll pull out three more screws. The top motherboard can pull away after that, revealing two motherboards. We've seen a lot of manufacturers do this sandwich motherboard thing lately. Apple and Asus are also using this stacked motherboard design to save space. Now we can get a closer look at the internal projector module for the Max 1. This little guy contains 3 different colored lasers, all working in tandem to project pictures and video at the top of the phone. Personally, I think it looks best in the 45 to 50 inch range in a completely dark room of course. Projectors will never quite be as bright as a TV. Blackview has said it can project up to a 200 inch screen size, but as we saw in my durability test, it gets kind of faded after 50. The metal housing is completely sealed shut. I'll still take it apart at the end of the video, so sit tight. The bottom of the board has a few more screws, and the side button ribbons that communicate with a latch style connector, and I'll also take out the dual SIM and SD card tray. After removing one more ribbon cable down at the base of the motherboard, the second motherboard can be lifted up and out of the frame. It has a few ribbon connectors on the back side which makes the teardown and reassembly much more complicated, but I doubt many people will be attempting this particular repair since the Max 1 isn't a mainstream phone, and probably won't have any replacement parts available. The dual front cameras are back here: a 16 megapixel with its .3 megapixel sidekick used for depth sensing. The earpiece, strangely enough, is soldered to the main board. Usually it is detachable and the circular vibrator is also soldered on. The rear camera has it's own latch style connector. The bottom charging port board is very securely glued into place. It's got the normal USB-C connector and instead of gold contact pads for the loudspeaker to rest on, it has two massive gold contact pins. Those pins rest up against the contact points on the back plastic housing for the loudspeaker. It's kind of an interesting design. You know that usually when I take apart phones, I like to keep the phones in working condition when I put them back together. Lately I haven't succeeded very often, but that's mostly because the internal components of recent flagships are so unique and so cool. I have to completely destroy the phone to get a good look at them. I was torn with this projector phone...should I take apart the laser? Should I not take apart the laser? Well the phone kind of decided my course of action all by itself. See when I put the phone back together expecting it to turn on, all I got was a super dim logo on the screen and nothing else. Just a sleepy Blackview Max 1 that wouldn't wake up entirely. And so since he wouldn't wake up, I'll take the slightly darker approach and just put it to sleep entirely. I do not recommend applying this motivational approach to small children or grandparents. I pulled the projector module from the internal phone guts, and since it very specifically said “do not remove the cover” on the top, we're gonna remove the cover on the top. Peeling back the thin metal covering reveals some super interesting stuff. Blackview says this laser projector is combined with micro-electromechanical technology which uses 3 different colored loser beams shining together to form images. We can see the three different colored lasers over here on the side – each one shining directly forward. The beam then gets redirected into a glass prism and then angled outward out the top of the phone. I imagine this black box over here in the side is the brains of the operation. This controls the auto focus, the angle of the screen, and the location and brightness of the individual laser beams. It takes some seriously intelligent people to think this stuff up. The fine-tuned engineering sitting in this very small machined aluminum box is some next level stuff. The technology has been around for a few years already, but it's improving, and I'm excited to see it again in a smartphone. The more things a smartphone can do, the more useful it becomes as a tool. And I'm a fan of features. If you had to pick between a projector inside your phone or a fold-able smartphone, which would you choose? Let me know down in the comments. Hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. I have some cool videos on the way. And come hang out with me on Instagram and Twitter. Thanks a ton for watching, and I'll see you around.