Rumor has it that OnePlus has snuck two batteries inside of the OnePlus 8T this year
to sped up it’s charging time. Instead of one battery charging at 30 watts like last year,
it’s now two batteries totaling 65 watts.
I say we go find them and see what they look like from the inside. Let’s get started.
[Intro]
This is the Aquamarine Green version of the 8T. I still think it looks more blue than anything else.
After all the crazy phones we’ve been dealing with like the Wing, Fold, and Duo,
it’ll be nice to open up a normal phone for a change. With some heat and gentle slicing we
can remove the back glass and fold it open like a book. Nothing special is attached to the glass.
The inside of the phone has the NFC coil near the top, but no wireless charging.
There are 16 normal Phillips head screws holding the whole phone together. I’ll link the tool kit
I’m using down in the video description. I’ll unplug the rear flash and top sensor,
then the top black plastics can come away from the phone,
along with the bottom plastics and the built-in loud speaker. There is no waterproofing on the
speaker unit. The mesh is on the frame as you’ll see in a second. The speaker does have foam balls
inside. These balls dampen the sound and make the speaker box sound bigger than it actually is.
Now you might be thinking, ‘Hey Jerry, it looks like there’s only one battery inside of this
phone.’ And you’re right. But appearances can be deceiving. We took the liberty of changing
the battery back to red with our Teardown Skin, like OnePlus used to do with the OnePlus One and
OnePlus Two. I’m sure there’s some kind of make batteries great again joke in here somewhere, but
since the last guy who said something similar is a joke, we’ll just avoid the subject altogether.
Up at the top we have some graphite tape and copper covering the silver shields.
OnePlus has even added thermal paste on the top side to keep things running efficiently.
Kind of fun. We make the Teardown Skin an exact representation of the actual
insides. I’ll put a link for the Skin down in the video description.
There’s a pretty good chance we’ve already made one to cover your phone.
I’ll unplug the battery and the two long extension ribbons. Both pop off like little Legos. There are
two screws holding down the motherboard. I can remove the front facing 16 megapixel camera.
There’s no OIS on this guy, but it does have electronic image stabilizing.
Now for the battery. If you look closely at the non-red battery you can see a crease down
the center. There are actually two halves, two batteries, but they’re packaged as one,
with one joint or seam down the center. Each of the halves have 2250 milliamp hour capacities for
a total of 4500. Now I’m no lithium expert, but it does seem to be standard across the board that
most phones don’t charge faster than 30 watts. So it’s probably safe to say that charging a
singular battery with more power than that might cause the battery to explode or catch fire.
But doubling up the batteries allows for double the power to be utilized. Tesla kind of uses
the same principle in their electric cars. A Tesla doesn’t have just one large battery under the car,
it’s actually six or seven thousand tiny little batteries that can all be charged
simultaneously very quickly. The copper cooling system of the 8T also extends beneath the battery
and might help with cooling. I’ll show you that in a second. The bottom SIM card tray board can
come away. It’s got some screws holding it down. Then the USB-C charging port can come
up. It’s on a ribbon all of its own and super easy to replace. It also has it’s own red rubber
ring around the tip for the water resistance, even though there is no official IP rating.
The square vibrator is down here as well, placed right here in the center of the phone above the
under screen fingerprint reader. It’s a haptic style vibrator. The under screen fingerprint
scanner is probably one of those flat sensor types without a lens and we’d have to break off the
screen in order to see it. I’ll disconnect the 4 Lego style ribbons that surround the rear cameras
and I’ll pull the whole thing out from the motherboard since
they’re all joined into the same metal housing.
We have the 16 megapixel ultra wide camera up top with no OIS. Then we have the main
48 megapixel sensor which does have optical image stabilization. Then we have the 5 megapixel macro
camera with no OIS, and the 2 megapixel monochrome which also does not have OIS.
Finally we can get the motherboard out and away from the phone. Where Samsung is now not using any
thermal paste on their motherboards, OnePlus has doubled down and doubled up, splattering thermal
goo all over the back of the motherboard, as well as a few dollops on the front. We can see that
the paste rests directly on top of the copper heat pipe which extends below the battery.
The copper can take the heat from the processor and the battery as well, I assume, and then
release it out the front of the display. Camera sensors are known to heat up as well. So there
is some graphite tape and copper underneath. But it doesn’t seem to be a part of the vapor chamber.
Now I’m always torn at this point since I do like seeing the vapor chambers in their entirety.
But in order to do so, I would have to remove the screen which kills the phone.
And I should probably leave this one alive since I definitely killed the last few phones that came
across my desk- The Fold 2 and the Duo. We can still check out a few more things though
like the waterproofing mesh over the loudspeaker holes in the bottom. And we can also slice
open the vapor chamber to see the little droplets of liquid inside near the bottom.
Since we don’t want any sharp objects underneath the battery when we put it back in,
I’ll just rip off the rest of the copper flap and lay the plastic layer back on top. Sharp objects
and lithium don’t play super well together. Now we can put everything back together and hope it still
turns on. I think this OnePlus 8T is the fourth phone that OnePlus has released this year. And
while it’s definitely still worth a glance with its incremental improvements, you know, if your
current phone is out of commission, personally I’d be okay if smartphone companies stopped releasing
3 or 4 versions of the same phone every year, and just focused on one or two more solid devices.
But I guess more variations reduce the overall risk of one design tanking. And they get their
brand out in front of people with each new release wave. Brand awareness is pretty priceless.
Either way, with everything turned on. It’s functioning like normal. Kind of nice to have
a phone living again after a tear down. I’ll leave a link for the Teardown Skin
down in the video description. And come hang out with me on Instagram and Twitter.
Thanks a ton for watching. I’ll see you around.