Today we’re going to take apart the Lumia 950 XL. It’s the same size as my Note 5.
It’s actually one of the more interesting phones I’ve taken apart recently and I’ll
show you why in just one second.
First things first, turn off the phone. The back of the
phone is removable so just push your fingernail underneath the back cover and pop it off.
And this exposes the QI charger and the battery. The battery is a 3300 milliamp which is quite
a bit bigger than the Note 5’s 3000 milliamp battery. Now there are 12 Torx screws in the
back cover. They’re a size T5. It might be a T4 as well just depending on what screwdriver
set you have. There are some variances from the Chinese manufacturers. Then to remove
the back panel you put your tweezers underneath by the charging port. Then you lift up the
little clasp underneath the camera as you can see from this angle here. Now here’s
the interesting part. It’s got some normal stuff under there like the earpiece and the
loud speaker and the flash of the camera. And then we have this beautiful copper snake-like
component right here. This is actually the water cooling. We’ve got the evaporator
and then we have the condenser pipe. So water heats up inside the evaporator as it rests
next to the processor. And either evaporates or gets hot and goes up the pipe and then
as it cools down from the copper, it will travel back down the pipe into the evaporator
again to recycle the process. Even if the water cooling itself isn’t super efficient,
having a copper heat sink that large has to be helping the heat transfer just a little
bit. You can see here where it rests on the motherboard on the opposite side of the processor.
One other cool aspect of this phone is that the SD card reader is removable similar to
some of the older Note phones. You just unsnap it with this little Lego-like connector from
the motherboard and it’s easy to put back on as well. Since this phone isn't super popular,
parts are hard to find, but I will link the parts that I do find down in the video description
below. Here is the vibrator motor. It’s got the dual sizes on it so it gives it more
full vibration. You can unsnap this tiny ribbon cable from the side. And here is the 5 megapixel
front camera. It’s got the same Lego-like connection that all the other connectors do
on this board, so we’re going to remove that. It’s semi-attached to the infrared
retina scanner. I’ll talk about that in just a second. There are two ribbon cables
for the screen that are on the motherboard. You can unsnap those. Here’s the headphone
jack; also removable. And the motherboard is clipped into the plastic frame. There are
a series of clips around the outside, so just undo those and then the motherboard will pop
out of the frame. Before you get too far though, you do have to remove this sticker that sits
behind the battery because there is one ribbon cable that sits on the back of the motherboard
right here. Once that’s snapped off, the motherboard is free from the phone and we
have access to the rear camera. Here is a 20 megapixel rear camera and here is where
that heat sink sits on the back of that processor. Here is the charging port. It is a type C
charging port. It is not removable. It is soldered very securely onto the main board,
so unless you know how to solder, it’s not going anywhere. Now here’s the infrared
iris scanner, so the phone itself can just scan your eye to unlock the phone. It’s
used for a Windows Hello. Now here’s the screen component itself. Now the ideal situation
would be to find the screen, which is the glass and the AMOLED, and the frame sold as
one unit. But if you cannot find it sold as one unit, it will probably just be the glass
and the AMOLED, in which case you have to harvest your old frame from the screen and
use it with your new one. And just use heat to separate the glass and the AMOLED from
the old frame and then you use the adhesive to apply it to new AMOLED and glass. It does
take a bit longer and your old AMOLED will not survive the process so make sure your
new one works before doing it. We’re going to reattach the rear camera and that one small
ribbon cable on the back of the motherboard and then set the motherboard down into place,
pressing it down into the series of clasps along around the outside. Here’s the headphone
jack, and clip that down into place. You’ll feel it snap down like a little Lego. Here’s
the 5 megapixel front camera. Going to clip that in first and then you can just fold it
over the top and press it down into the frame where it belongs. We’re going to clip the
screen ribbon cables down into place as well, and the small ribbon cable on the side of
the board next to the vibrator motor. And the sticker goes back into place, resting
right over the top of those ribbon cables. Then the back panel, along with those 12 Torx
screws. The battery goes into place, and the back cover. If you have any questions, leave
them down in the comments. Don’t forget to “like” if this video helped you. Don’t
forget to subscribe, it does mean a lot to me. Hope to see you around!