Today we're going to tear down the Mate 30 Pro. This is quite possibly the best phone
unable to be sold in the United States right now due to the controversial ban by the US
Government. Kind of exciting. This thing has an under display speaker instead of a normal
earpiece, so we're going to see how that works from the inside.
Let's get started.
[Intro]
Removing the glass on glass-backed phones is sometimes pretty difficult. One little
trick I like to use when the adhesive is super strong is to insert my metal pry tool or razor
blade next to the softer plastic antenna lines. The little section of plastic is much more
forgiving than the super tight tolerance between the glass and the metal frame. There are machines
that do this as well, of course, but unless you own a cellphone repair shop, a hot plate
glass suction separator machine is probably not very high on your Christmas wish list.
After slicing all the way around the edge of the glass, I am able to lift the glass
up and off of the phone body. Nothing important is attached to the glass panel itself, but
there are fragile ribbons around the edge of the frame inside of the phone, so be careful
while you're slicing if you ever attempt this on your own.
Underneath the glass we see a circular wireless charging pad and the quad 4 camera ray up
top. Now, Huawei has made things a tad more difficult with this teardown by adding 22
screws that are 3 different sizes. So it's important to keep them all organized.
There is a small plastic chunk underneath the little flippy loincloth, which sits over
the battery connection. I'll slip my pry tool in here and unclip the battery like a little
Lego, and then finish removing the rest of the rear plastics and unplugging the dual
LED flash ribbon that's also connected to the motherboard. This wireless charging coil
transfers power with the two little contact pads on the back, and can wirelessly charge
at 27 watts and do reverse wireless charging to other devices. The charging port ribbon
has a little piece of metal holding down the Lego-style ribbon connector. I'll pop that
off and then unclip the charging port ribbon. There's another little metal bracket down
here that holds down the ribbon connector for the loudspeaker. Once that's removed I'll
pull off the bottom plastics and shimmy the USB-C charging port out from the bottom of
the phone. This little guy only costs $4 to replace.
The Mate 30 Pro has a pretty straightforward and easy charging port replacement. It has
an orange ring around the bottom, which very aesthetically matches with the rest of the
phone. It can charge at 40 watts and is ip68. The SIM and proprietary nano memory card tray
come out next. Normally I'm a fan of expandable memory, but Huawei went and made their own
more expensive non-universal card, which kind of defeats the purpose. The loudspeaker has
it's own little screw holding it down to the frame. I'll remove that and then the loudspeaker
can come up and out of the Mate 30 Pro. A lot of times we see these speaker boxes sealed
shut with just one port for the sound to come out of. But Huawei has openings on both sides
of the speaker box, with water resistant mesh protecting both ends. It's normal they would
want to protect the hole leading to the exterior of the device, but it is curious that they
protected the interior opening as well. But protection is always a good thing.
There is the cutest of cute baby extension ribbons connected to the optical under screen
fingerprint scanner. This obviously isn't baby Yoda level of cuteness, and it kind of
makes you wonder why they didn't just make this scanner ribbon cable a tad longer. It's
probably because they had a bunch of optical sensors laying around and are just adapting
that particular component to this phone's layout. The optical fingerprint scanner shines
out through the OLED display to take a picture of your unique fingerprint so it can unlock
the phone. Pretty cool. I'll remove the longer, definitely not as cute, extension ribbon cable
on the right side of the phone. And then we have access to the battery. I'll peel up the
orange number one and orange number two tabs before grabbing number three, and hoisting
the battery up and out of the phone body.
This guy is a 4500 milliamp hour capacity, and thankfully pretty easy to remove. Thumbs
up for that. It's always good for repairability when the battery isn't glued in. I'll remove
the screen ribbon cable connected to the peninsula of the motherboard, and 4 more ribbons around
the quad camera module. We can then pull the camera unit away and see what takes all the
pictures inside of this Mate 30 Pro.
The top left camera is the 3D time of flight that does all the depth sensing stuff. The
top right camera is the ultra-wide 40 megapixel. And the bottom right is the 40 megapixel main
sensor with OIS. And finally, the bottom left sensor is the 8 megapixel 3x optical telephoto
lens which also has optical image stabilization. All the cameras are molded into one large
block so that they can work simultaneously with each other and not shift out of position
if the phone ever gets dropped.
There is an extension ribbon covering the under screen speaker, and one more screw holding
down the motherboard. After the screw's removed, the whole motherboard can come out of the
frame. You can see the copper pad that the processor rests on top of with it's thermal
paste. The motherboard still has the front cameras attached with their Lego-style ribbon
connectors. These are the 32 megapixels selfie camera and another 3D time of flight camera.
Now let's take a look at the underscreen earpiece. Notice that the speaker is screwed into the
frame of the phone. This helps the component vibrate the frame to produce sound. Popping
off the top we can see the coils of copper wire inside the cap, which rest against the
magnet still attached to the frame. It really is just like a normal speaker...just beefier.
With enough guts to vibrate the frame of the phone and produce the sound for your ear to
hear. And all of this happens through the other side of the display. The magnet inside
of the speaker is super strong.
Speaking of magnets, the vibrator motor is also over here. And this guy is rectangular
this time and super small. I'm going to go ahead and crush it open. I still haven't made
a proper vibrator review video, but we'll start with this one since there are quite
a few different styles of vibrators out there. Removing the outer casing reveals another
smaller box inside of the larger box. And breaking the smaller box loose shows another
copper coil with two magnets inside the metal frame that access the hammer of sorts. The
energy coming through the copper coil can move these magnets, just like in a speaker
or a motor, which makes the inner metal vibrate against the outer metal shell. They call this
an x-axis linear actuator.
Two more things I want to point out before we try to reassemble this and see if it still
works, is that underneath the copper plate we do see a heat pipe which is good for phone
cooling. In order to see the rest of the pipe though, we would have to rip off the horizon
display, which does kind of kill the display. So we'll just admire it from this end. And
lastly, we get an up-close look at the modular infrared diode that shines up through the
top of the phone as kind of a remote control. It's cool to see how everything functions
here from the inside.
The good thing about this Mate 30 Pro is that everything is super modular, which means that
if one part breaks, all that needs to be done is replace that one part, and the whole phone
doesn't need to be thrown away. I'm a huge fan of this kind of construction. Modular
construction also usually means that the replacement parts are much cheaper, aside from the screen
of course. OLED displays are usually the most expensive components on the whole phone.
I'll get the battery situated back into it's cavity and get the little side brackets screwed
down and wires organized. Then I can get the back plastics clipped in and screwed down
with those 22 screws I kept organized from earlier. Not too bad. I'll hit the power button,
and lucky for us the phone does still turn on even after being completely dismantled.
Not too shabby.
I take apart every new phone when it comes out. So hit that subscribe button if you haven't
already. And come hang out with me on Instagram and Twitter. And if you made it this far in
the video, let me know what you had for breakfast this morning down in the comments. It'll confuse
the people who peaced out early.
Thanks a ton for watching. And I'll see you around.