Today we’re going to be taking apart and tearing down the Galaxy S7 Active.
This is the exact same phone that I did my durability test on and the same phone that
we verified whether the screen was plastic or glass, that’s why it’s all cracked
up right now.
I’m going to turn the phone off.
Remember that the top layer of the screen is plastic.
We are going to use heat to soften the adhesive between the screen and the frame of the phone
in order to remove it.
So make sure not to get your heat gun too close to the screen because it will melt.
And if you’re only doing a battery replacement and you want to reuse the screen it’s very
important to not damage it.
So I’m taking a heat gun, you can also use your mother’s hair dryer if it gets hot
enough, and I’m heating up the screen until it’s too hot to touch.
It should only take about 60 seconds or so.
You want the heat to penetrate underneath the plastic layer, underneath the glass layer,
and underneath the AMOLED layer.
Now that the screen is warmed up I’m going to take a thin metal pry tool and slide it
between the rubber edge of the phone and the glass layer of the screen.
The screen does cool down after a while so I’m going to heat it up again about every
60 seconds.
Good thing I have plenty of these thin metal pry tools to keep the screen from re-adhering
down to the frame.
You can also use a business card or a playing card.
This phone is very similar to the waterproof Galaxy S5; the screen lifts up the same way.
You have a much lower chance of damaging the buttons though with the Galaxy S7 Active as
you’ll see in a second.
So now I’m taking my playing card and slipping it underneath the AMOLED screen taking very
special care not to hit that bottom edge corner because that’s where the AMOLED screen is
the weakest.
You can see as I slide my pry tool down, my screen is already cracked, so it’s cracking
more as I lift it out of the frame.
I had zero expectation that the screen was going to survive this teardown because of
how little support the glass is giving the AMOLED display underneath.
You can see the glass crack as I lift it up out of the frame a little bit.
Softening the adhesive as I go.
I did drop the home button out of the frame.
That does need to stay on the frame of the phone as you lift the screen.
After about 5 minutes of heating and reheating and cutting the adhesive, the screen was ready
to lift out of the frame.
Take very special care not to damage the top end of the screen because that’s where the
ribbon cables are located that give signals to the screen, so if you damage those, you’re
just out of luck.
There’s a little plastic tab holding down the screen ribbon connector; I’m going to
pop that out.
Remember that the phone is off at this point; that is very very important.
This is the replacement screen; I will link the replacements down in the video description
below as soon as they become available.
You probably will need to move the buttons from your old screen to your new screen.
(The back and menu buttons.)
There’s a plastic connector over the home button scanner; going to remove that.
It is easily replaceable.
And then there’s one little screw over the battery connector; set that off to the side.
And then unplug the battery.
Very important for the rest of the steps.
Then there are 12 screws holding down this super thick mid-frame to the motherboard.
Going to remove that; just popping it out of the plastic frame.
And this is attached to the battery.
The battery is a 4,000 milliamp battery.
It is super super thick and very heavy.
There are no pull tabs or anything underneath it so we’re just going to use the blunt
edge of my pry tool and pop it out of the frame.
Then you can set your new battery back down into place if you’re replacing it.
Let’s give this phone a thumbs up for having such a beastly battery.
There’s one screw underneath the proximity sensor.
And then I’m going to detach the front mic as well.
There are two ribbon cables down here at the bottom.
I’m also going to remove the SIM card tray and then the motherboard can just pop out
of the frame.
Here are the contact points for the wireless charger.
We have the contact points for the earpiece, the headphone jack, the side power buttons.
Down here is the vibrator and the loud speaker underneath the charging port; which we will
get to in a second.
So here is the motherboard.
The front facing camera pops off like a little Lego, as well as the proximity sensor has
a little Lego connection, and the rear facing camera also has the same Lego-type connection
as the other components…which makes thing easily replaceable.
So on top here we have the rear facing 12 megapixel camera.
And on bottom we have the front facing 5 megapixel camera.
You can see that the rear facing camera does have the OIS image stabilization where the
camera actually compensates for the motion of your hand during the recording.
The front facing camera does not have OIS.
It’s pretty easy to attach the cameras back to the frame again, just set them into place
and you’ll feel the little connection clip in exactly like a little Lego.
The SIM card tray is not removable and you can kind of see the discoloration from the
processor but that’s pretty normal with all smart phones.
The charging port has two screws along the bottom and then you can pull it out of the
little slot that it’s sitting in.
There is a little rubber ring around the end of the charging port.
I’ll show you how to install that on your new one.
The loud speaker is underneath the charging port.
So here is the charging port.
It also has the back button and menu buttons built into the charging port, so if one of
those buttons is messed up you’ll need to replace the charging port to fix it.
It has a built in microphone and then the micro USB charging port has a little rubber
ring around the end of it, and that helps with water proofing as it rests against the
edge of the plastic frame.
We’re going to pop that back in and put the two black screws in along the bottom to
hold it tight.
Now the charging port connects to the bottom of the motherboard but it’s on the back
of the motherboard so it’s important to clip it in before you set the motherboard
into place.
It’s the same design as the Galaxy S6 and the Note phones.
We’re going to set the motherboard into place making sure that there’s nothing being
pinched underneath the bottom edge of it.
There’s one screw at the top underneath the proximity sensor that we’re going to
screw in.
The SIM card tray can set into place, and then we’re going to connect these wire cables,
just position them over the top of the little circle doohickey and then press them down
into place.
Then the thick mid-frame and the battery get set down into place on top of the motherboard.
You can hear it satisfyingly click in as you press it into place.
I’m not going to connect the battery yet.
I’m going to make sure all of these 12 screws are screwed in.
And then I’m going to connect the home button cable and put the little plastic connector
over the top of it so it doesn’t come loose.
Now I can connect the battery.
Take very very special care not to turn on the phone as you’re connecting the screen.
Having power through that connection as you’re connecting it could be very bad for your new
screen.
Taking care not to touch the power button, clip your new screen into place.
I’m just using my old screen, the same broken one as before, because the new screens are
not available yet.
And to my surprise, the thing actually still works.
I had zero expectations that this thing was going to survive.
Most phones have a glass digitizer, the part that senses your touch, so if you crack that
it doesn’t sensor touch anymore and the screen breaks.
But this phone could very well have a plastic digitizer like the Droid Turbo 2.
Your new screen will probably have adhesive on the bottom of it, so remove the protection
over the adhesive and set it down into place.
And you should be good to go.
Make sure the home button lines up through the hole in the screen and pinch everything
down into place.
If you’ve liked what you’ve seen so far, go ahead and hit that subscribe button, it
does help me out a lot and helps me keep making repair videos far into the future.
If you haven’t broken your current phone, you might break your next one, and hopefully
I’ll already have a video for it.
If you have any questions make sure to leave them in the comments below.
I do respond fairly regularly.
Thank you so much for watching and I hope to see you around.