iFixit has gotten its hands, and tools, onto the new Note 10+ 5G. The thorough teardown has revealed some intriguing finds into the inner-workings of Samsung’s latest flagship.
The Note 10+ 5G is an impressive phone, but you’ll want to be very careful with it as it was handed a 3 out of 10 repairability score. This score is attributed to a few things, one of which is that the device has an all-glass front and back, tightly glued to the metal frame. There is an added level of difficulty where the back glass contours around the Bixby button.
The first noticeable change in iFixit’s Galaxy Note 10 Plus 5G teardown, published Thursday, is that the entire motherboard is located at the top half of the phone. This is different than in previous phones such as the Galaxy Note 9, according to iFixit, where there’s a segment of the motherboard on the side that spans the full length of the phone. Keeping the motherboard to half the phone allows for the addition of an even bigger battery, which in the case of the Note 10 Plus is 4,300-mAh.
Samsung stacked the motherboard to save the space. Apple used this method with the iPhone X. On the motherboard with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of flash storage is the key to making 5G work: the Qualcomm X50 5G modem. This is what will get the ridiculous download speeds if the phone is in a 5G area.
With so much power and components literally on top of each other, you need a way to keep things cool in this case, a vapor chamber. Samsung made use of this cooling system in the Galaxy S10 Plus, but it gave the cooler an update to help the phone from overheating, which is a potential issue with Galaxy S10 5G.
iFixit found where the sound from the internal speaker comes from it’s through a grille located at the very top part of the case.
