Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Teardown Shows a Hard to Repair Design: iFixit

While the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 is due to launch in India on Tuesday at an event in New Delhi, it has already received over 2.5 lakh registrations in the country. Last week we saw the Galaxy Note 8 pass through the rigorous durability test run by JerryRigEverything where it astounded with some praiseworthy results. But, how easily can Samsung’s latest flagship be repaired? Renowned break-and-repair guide website iFixit has done a teardown of the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and the results are not great – it has received a score of 4 out of 10.

iFixit tore down the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 to find out a couple of standard mobile equipments after removing the back glass panel of the smartphone using the iOpener tool, where it found that the cable of fingerprint scanner mounted at the rear side is quite delicate, which can be speared through a slight cut through the adhesive. There are Philips screws inside the back panel, and need to be removed to take the mid-frame out. The internals of the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 include a non-removable 3300mAh battery placed in the ‘dead-centre’ – which comes as a variation to the placement of batteries in previous Galaxy smartphones.

Other than this, the motherboard and the camera setup of the smartphone were detailed by iFixit. The motherboard consists of Samsung K3UH6H60AM-NGCJ 6GB of LPDDR4x SDRAM layered over a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, along with Samsung KLUCG4J1ED-B0C1 64GB UFS flash (inbuilt) storage, a Qualcomm WCD9341 Aqstic audio codec for sound purpose, and other radio connectivity modules.

Coming to the display, which is exactly identical to Samsung Galaxy S8 in terms of the technology and aspect ratio, it didn’t come off that easily, and some heat and opening picks were used to dissemble it. iFixit states that replacing the display requires the removal of glass rear panel and the display as well, both of which are fragile in nature and tightly bound with strong adhesives.

Some other small modules and components can be easily replaced “independently”, however replacing the battery would require some extra efforts due to the tough adhesion with high quality glue. “All repairs require removing the glass rear panel, which is challenging due to the large amount of adhesive,” says iFixit emphasising on the quality of glue used inside the Galaxy Note 8.

So, overall the Galaxy Note 8 has scored a 4 out of 10 in terms of repairability, but that’s not the lowest. The Essential Phone scored 1 out of 10 after the iFixit teardown test.