Samsung Note 10+ Teardown - TWO Wireless Chargers? By JerryRigEverything

The Galaxy Note 10 is usually the Swiss Army Knife of all smartphones. It's the phone that has everything and can do everything... or at least it used to be before Samsung removed the headphone jack. Today we're going to review the Galaxy Note 10+ from the inside, see what makes it tick, and see if there was actually room for that jack. Let's get started. Let's get started.

You have to hold the power and volume down button at the same time to turn off the phone... because that makes a whole lot of sense. Let's get started. This video is actually going to be super interesting. The Note 10+ is arguably one of the most feature-rich smartphones on the market right now.

To remove the vivid back panel, we'll break out the heat gun. Glass and metal sandwiches tend to all be built the same. With a glass panel, I do have to take special care not to flex the glass too much or the whole thing might shatter. Once the adhesive is warmed up and softened underneath the glass, my suction cup can pull up and my razor blade and pry tools can slice through the adhesive that's holding the panel to the frame. It's a very tedious process.

The inexpensive plastic Galaxy A50 was just as colorful as this Note 10, and it used a plastic panel which is way more durable than glass. One thing that makes this Note 10 even harder than usual to open up is the curve of the glass that wraps around the side portions of the phone. Any pressure in the wrong spot along that curve might shatter the whole panel. With enough time, patience, and a slight headache from looking at this flashy tie-dyed tech, we finally get the back panel to separate from the phone. The rear glass doesn't have any electronics attached to it.

All the wireless charging is built into the phone body. To go deeper, we'll have to remove 14 normal Phillips head screws. Thumbs up to Samsung for not using proprietary screws. Once those are out I can fold over the metal plate and unplug the golden battery connector. The wireless charging coil is plugged in right next to it.

Unplugging that releases the wireless coil from the phone. You might be thinking to yourself, 'Hey Jerry, why do you keep calling this black sheet a coil?' That's because it is. You can see the circular shape of the copper windings underneath the black covering. These internal copper windings inside the Note 10+ will rest on top of the copper windings found inside of a wireless charging pad. The pair of coils creates an electromagnetic field through which energy can transfer into the phone.

This might come as a surprise, but this large wireless charging coil isn't the only wireless coil found inside the Note 10. On the left side of the phone we see a large rectangular housing. This is used to store the s-pen, and at the very top of that housing where the tip of the pen sits when it's parked inside of the phone is a little baby wireless charger. I can peel off the black tape to reveal the miniature copper coils that sit right on top of the coils wrapped around the tip of the stylus. Once again creating two sets of coils that form another smaller electromagnetic field.

Power flows from the phone battery through the two coils and into the s-pen capacitor which we discovered when we carefully disassembled the s-pen in the durability test video. This wireless transfer is also why the s-pen cannot be made from metal since metal obstructs wireless charging. It's some pretty mind blowing tech and we've barely even started this teardown. Let's pull off the top black plastics. This reveals a dual colored motherboard – both blue and green.

A transparent Note 10 would look pretty awesome. I'll unplug the power and volume buttons. The connectors just unplug like a little Lego. I can remove the front facing camera. It's a 10 megapixel little guy with no optical image stabilization.

The black square here in the center of the motherboard is the earpiece strangely enough. It's in a weird location. We'll dig more into that in just a second. I'll pop off the three ribbon cables down here along the bottom of the motherboard, along with another ribbon on the right side, each unsnapping like a little Lego. Then I can remove the SIM and SD card tray.

Remember that Samsung made three versions of this phone. The regular size Note 10 does not have an SD card slot. The dual colored motherboard can lift away from the phone housing at this point. The reason why this motherboard has two colors is that it's actually two motherboards stacked on top of each other. Kind of like what we say inside of the newer iPhones.

It's a thick sandwich of really expensive technology. Surprisingly though, even with the extra thick motherboard, there's no thermal paste on the back, just a gray foamy pad looking thing. Let's take a look at the cameras. This block of cameras is another piece of mind blowing tech. The Note 10+ wide angle camera is up top with no optical image stabilization.

Then there's a regular 12 megapixel normal camera which does have OIS. And then a 12 megapixel two times optical zoom camera at the bottom. This also has OIS. Samsung is the only manufacturer to release a variable aperture camera unit. Just like, you know, your pupils are just inside of your eyeball to get the optimal light for your eye.

This little circle opens and closes to get the optimal amount of light for Samsung's camera sensor, depending on the situation. It's pretty cool. The lens on the right side is a depth sensor. We've seen this pop up in a lot of phones lately and it's only available on the Note 10+. We're going to check out the copper cooling pad here in a second, but first we need to uncover the charging port.

The black plastics come off easy enough since we already took out the screws. The plastics contain the bottom loudspeaker. It's got the same little baffle balls hidden inside the speaker like we saw in the OnePlus phones. It's a little ball pit for ants. I'll remove the two extension ribbons and the three additional screws.

Then the whole little charging port can come away from the frame of the phone. With the Galaxy S10, this port was not replaceable so I'm glad Samsung changed their minds and didn't permanently attach the charging port to the motherboard again. Another change is that now we have a square vibration motor. This probably contains a similar taptic feel that the iPhones have. And we also have the same water resistant mesh over the speaker and microphone openings that we've seen inside the phones for a couple years now.

These help the Note keep water out for its ip68 rating. What about the question: Is there actually room in here for the headphone jack? The answer is yes, there is always room. The circuit boards can be designed and rearranged however Samsung wants. Proof of that is here with the double stacked motherboard. Stacking the motherboard allows for more room.

They could just have easily stacked parts of the lower charging port board and added the headphone jack at the bottom. Or stacked more of the upper board onto each other to make room for the port up top. Easy peasy. It's no coincidence that Apple removed the headphone jack at the same time they launched their wireless air pods. Or that OnePlus lost the headphone jack when they launched their bullet headphones.

Or even the Pixel lost the headphone jack when they launched the Pixel Buds. And now Samsung lost the jack as they push their wireless Galaxy Buds. Coincidence? Absolutely not. Removing the jack coerces customers into buying additional technology from the same company who made your phone. Companies know this and companies like this.

Another thing companies do is make your phone harder to repair so that instead of fixing it, you just go buy a new one. And Samsung is just as guilty as the rest of them with this permanently glued in battery. Each bend of this battery as I try to remove it, is super dangerous. The internal layers could pinch together and short out at any moment, causing a fire. You would think that Samsung would want to avoid exploding batteries and just add easy to remove pull tabs like Apple does, especially considering their history.

And as the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, Samsung should be leading the way with battery pull tabs or gentle adhesive so that one, I don't blow my fingers off, and two, so that I can stop saying Apple has them beat in one area. That's more painful than losing a finger. The battery of the Note 10+ is a 4300 milliamp hour. The regular Note 10 would be a 3500 milliamp hour. Another mind blowing piece of tech inside this Note 10+ is this super slim under screen fingerprint scanner glued directly underneath the screen.

During my Galaxy S10 teardown video I broke open the whole phone to show the insides and talk more about how this works. Today though, I'm going to keep the Note 10 in one piece so hopefully it will still turn on when I put the whole thing back together. Seeing the outline of the scanner with my LED light is pretty cool though. There are a few things left before we reassemble the phone. A water damage indicator sticker here next to the SIM card tray opening.

And then we have the earpiece which is strangely pretty far away from the actual earpiece grill location. Popping it out reveals that it is indeed a speaker and not the under display vibrating technology we saw inside the LG G8. It looks like the speaker fires downward into a hollow channel between the frame and the screen. Then the sound is directed up towards the top of the phone to eject out the hole near the SIM card tray. There's also a super incredibly thin opening between the front glass and metal top of the phone.

It's pretty hard to see since it's only 5 human hairs thick. I actually use human hair to measure everything which explains a lot. Finally we come to the heat pipe or vapor chamber as Samsung calls it. We normally only see this type of cooling in high end gaming phones like the Razer Phone 2 or the Black Shark 2. It's cool to see the technology making making it's way into non-gaming phones.

As we know, solid copper is a great conductor of heat. It pulls away heat from hot objects like processors and goes and dissipates that heat elsewhere inside the phone. Heat pipes are more efficient than a copper slab because of the liquid inside the pipe. The vapor chambers like the one we see here take cooling to a whole new level - beyond that even of heat pipes Slicing the vapor chamber open, we can see that it's a hollow pouch with plenty of room inside for liquid to move around. The liquid will vaporize at one end where the processor is heating up, and then cool down as it reaches the far end of the chamber.

Only to be wicked back again to the processor by the copper strands and copper mesh capillary action so it can start the whole process over again. It's kind of like a liquid cooling system built for PCs but crammed down into a really small space. The liquid is still present here in the pouch even after I opened it up and messed around at the insides. The wire wicking mesh is pretty interesting. The copper vapor chamber does a good job of helping the phone run efficiently, but it's not mandatory for functionality.

The phone should still work and turn on without this in place. We'll see if that's true in just a few seconds as we assemble the phone. The Note lineup used to be the absolute pinnacle of everything that Android phones were capable of, so I'm sad to see now that Samsung dropped even one useful feature like the headphone jack. But even without that feature, it's still one of the most, if not the most, well-designed and feature-rich cellphones you can buy right now. So if you're looking for the best of the best, and willing to pay a premium for 100% of what smartphones are capable of right now, this is probably the phone to get.

Just keep in mind that you can probably get a perfectly decent phone that does 90% of what the Note 10 does for about half the cost from someone else. Smartphones decrease in value faster than a piece of used gum, so unless you make money with your smartphone, you can always just go get last year's version for a fraction of the price. There aren't very many substantial improvements between one year and another. Would you look at that. The whole thing still turns on.

Gotta love that. The Note 10+ is a very tempting phone. I'll probably upgrade at some point in the future when there's a price drop or I can find a good deal. But for now I'll just stick with my 2 ½ year old Galaxy 8+ for a little while longer. Hit that subscribe button if you haven't already.

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Source : JerryRigEverything