The Samsung Galaxy A80 is one of the most over-engineered smartphones we've come across
this year with a motorized camera that both extends up and rotates around to face the
front. Pretty interesting. Today we're going to take the whole thing apart and see how
it all works from the inside.
Let's get started.
[Intro]
If you remember, during my durability test, which this phone obviously survived, the rear
panel next to the camera seam started to lift off the phone a little bit. So that's where
we're going to start today. Lifting up with my large suction cup and slicing through the
very strong adhesive under the glass. One down side of having a motor inside the phone
with a large opening for the camera protrusion is that the phone is not water resistant.
But Samsung went ahead and still made this rear adhesive super strong anyway. Finally,
with enough persuasion, the glass can lift off exposing some pretty cool looking internals.
That copper colored NFC pad looks pretty awesome. Thumbs up for that. If the phone still works
when I put it all back together, maybe we'll make a clear version.
I'll turn the phone on real quick so we can see the internal hardware in action. When
I press the camera button on the screen, we can watch the camera rise up and out of the
phone with the longest stepper motor shaft we've ever seen. The black and pink plastics
still hide most of the hardware, but we're getting there. The rear black plastics are
held down by 12 normal Philips head screws. They're actually quite a lot of screws in
here so I'm going to keep everything organized on my desk. Once the screws are out the back
plastics can come off of the phone. The NFC pad has the same copper coloring that we saw
on the back of the Pixel 4XL. This time though it's attached to the plastics and not the
rear glass. Normally I would unplug the battery at this point, but this autopsy's going to
be live. We want the phone to keep motoring up and down a few more times while we figure
out how it works.
The bottom lower loud speaker comes out next. There are no foam balls inside of this guy,
in fact it looks like the rear speaker is just set inside of the plastic housing and
not built out of the plastic housing. A reminder that this phone only costs $500 on Amazon
right now so there probably were a few corners cut to save pennies here and there...especially
when so much work when into motorizing the camera. After heating up the plastic area
underneath the triple camera setup, I was able to peel it away revealing more pink anodized
aluminum Same as up here underneath the top plastics
section around the camera - more pink anodized metal.
Now we can see a bit more of what's going on. The whole motor is visible at this point
and we can see all of the magic happening inside the A80 is happening with just one
motor, raising and flipping. We'll have to go deeper to understand it. I'll remove the
plastic screw protectors and unscrew the 2 screws at the top of the motor shaft that
hold the motor to the top portion of the phone. Along with 4 more screws that hold the top
of the phone to the side guardrails. There is a metal plate at the base of these side
rails that catch on little lips to stop the upward motion and start the camera flipping
motion. We'll see more in just a second. The camera still can't be removed to the phone
though since it's attached to the underside of the motherboard.
I'll remove the 5 Phillips head screws holding the motherboard to the frame and then unplug
the little stepper motor connector, along with the massive mammoth cable going down
to the charging port - just like big little Lego. Once everything is unplugged, the whole
motherboard and camera unit can slide up and out of the guiding rails and away from the
phone. I don't think we've ever had a phone that disassembles in massive chunks like this
before. It looks pretty cool inside. We can get an up-close look at the stepper motor
now. It has one threaded shaft that can raise and lower the metal part that grips the top.
It also has a smooth guiding shaft on the right that keeps the piece level while it's
motoring up and down. These large metal rails in the side are probably what help keep both
halves in place while I was attempting my bend test. There's also a coin-style vibrator
motor and a small pad of thermal foam underneath the motherboard.
Before we start taking apart the flippy part of the camera, let's remove the charging port.
It has 3 ribbon cables and one screw, and then the whole thing can pull away. Oh. One
second....and then the whole thing can pull away from the phone. This little guy has a
USB-C charger that can fast charge at 18 watts. Along with a built-in SIM card tray. Down
here underneath the charging port are 2 more screws that hold in the underscreen fingerprint
scanner. This is an optical little guy. You can see the little camera lens that takes
a picture of your finger through the pixels on the OLED screen. Now normally I do like
to remove the back from smartphones, but Samsung has once again made this impossible. Removing
the battery is a death sentence to the phone since any bend while prying it out will cause
the internal layers of the battery to touch, which makes the battery either short out immediately
or slowly expand and die over the next few months. So it's super unfortunate that Samsung
isn't allowing these batteries to be removed, especially since this number right here is
the environment-friendly use period meaning 5 is the number of years you have before the
chemicals in the battery might start leaking out. That'll be exciting for your pocket.
Samsung should allow their permanent batteries to be more easily removable.
I'll unplug each of the camera ribbon cables on the back of the motherboard, then I'll
heat up and peel back the last plastic pink layer around the front side of the camera.
This exposes eight more Phillips head screws. Once those are off I can remove the two black
plastic protective pieces. Then we get our first real good look at the camera hardware.
As this top portion of the phone gets motored up, we can see the camera starts flipping
around like some kind of rotisserie chicken. This rotation only happens at the peak of
extension. You can see the camera ribbon cables are actually rotating around the spindles
as well with the camera, getting tighter when the camera is facing the front of the phone
and loosening up when the camera is in it's normal rear-facing position. All of this action
is so that the higher-quality camera can be used on both the front and back of the phone.
I'll unclip each of the spindly camera connectors, remove 4 more screws, and I can pull the camera
skeleton away from the metal body. This gives us a better view of the gears that take the
upward force at the peak of the stepper motor lift and transition it into the rotisserie
chicken force for the pop-up camera, which gets that flippy motion. Pretty ingenious.
Definitely more complicated than the dual screen phone we took apart a while ago, but
it's still very interesting to see the camera in motion.
I hope you haven't gotten bored of seeing screws yet. We have 4 more left. Samsung switched
things up a bit with a tri-tip screw instead of a Phillips head. My tool kit does come
with all kinds of bits though. I'll link that down in the video description. Once the screws
are taken apart on both sides, the pink chicken can come apart, showing us the three different
cameras inside of the Galaxy A80. The 8 megapixel ultra wide camera on the left, 48 megapixel
main camera in the center, and a 3D depth camera on the right side next to the LED flash
– none of which have optical image stabilization. This $500 phone has enough futuristic over-engineering
inside that makes it look like it belongs in a Star Wars movie. It's pretty amazing
what can be done with the limited space inside of a cell phone body. It takes some super
smart people to think these things up.
Getting the phone back together is easy enough. Just kidding, there are like 40-something
screws inside of here so it's more like a nightmare. But at least we got to see all
the stuff we came here for. I'll make sure the long stepper motor is secured into the
camera unit, and everything along the side rails is attached and screwed in. Staying
organized is really the key to working with all these little screws and components. One
sneeze and it's all over.
I'll get the charging port secured into place with the loudspeaker on top. Once the battery
is connected I can turn the phone back on to see if the motor is set right and functional.
I still want to see what a clear version of the A80 would look like. And there we go.
It's definitely still working.
You already know how clear phones work from my other videos so I won't bore you with the
details. This A80 is more one of the laminate colored pieces of glass. The kind where the
color pulls away in large chunks. This might look easy on camera, but since laminate is
not designed to peel away from the glass, it is fairly difficult and requires quite
a bit of force. Remember that if you ever attempt this yourself, it is very difficult.
The laminate also holds the glass together if it ever cracks. So my clear phones are
weaker than the original. Of course if Samsung did this at the factory, they could just add
clear laminate and be just fine. Finally, after all the curlicues of color are removed
from the glass, I can set it down into place. And once again, I totally think Samsung should
be making clear versions of this phone. With all the moving parts and even a cool copper
NFC coil, I think the Galaxy A80 is currently front runner for having the best looking smartphone
guts of the year. Let me know what you think. Would you rather have an extravagant motorized
camera system in your phone, or would you prefer the dual screen method to get rid of
the notch like we saw on the Nubia Z20? Let me know down in the comments. Either way,
phones this year have been pretty awesome.
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