It's time to take a look at the world's first under display camera – from the
inside. This Axon 20 5G has secrets that need revealing. It'll be interesting to see
if our own mortal human eyes can peer through the transparent display once it's open,
or if that's something only the camera can do. Let's get started.
[Intro]
Getting inside the Axon 20 is pretty similar to other glass back smartphones. A lot of heat
and gentle prying. Even though there's not an official water resistance rating on this guy,
there is still a lot of glue. I can use my razor blade around the Noxv logo,
taking special care not to put too much stress on the glass, since glass is glass and all.
The back glass is pretty awesome...like a Nazgul dressing up for a work party.
Finally, the back glass does come off. Having a good suction cup is always useful.
And now that we're inside the phone I think my new screwdriver set is a bit of overkill since
all I really need is a Phillips head. I'll put a link for this new toolkit down in the description.
There are 20 screws holding down the back plastics. One of those screws is hidden
up here under the NFC coil...which I'm 94% sure isn't supposed to be removed just yet.
The interesting part of this phone though is that instead of just the rear plastics being removed,
it's actually the whole back plastics and the side rails that come away from the screen in
one piece – something that we don't see very often. ZTE is keeping us on our toes over here.
The dual rear flash has some gold contact pads that just rest on top of the motherboard.
We can unplug the battery just like a little Lego, and the bottom speaker can also come out
at this point. It has some of those gold contact pads for communicating with the motherboard.
The vibrator motor is one of those old school eccentric rotating mass
motors from the olden days. But keep in mind that this phone is also only $450
and still has some bleeding edge display tech. So we'll have to give this ancient vibrator a pass.
There's a water damage indicator sticker next to the USB-C charging port.
I'll unclip the side button ribbons, along with the two long extension ribbons over the battery.
And unfortunately for us, the battery adhesive is still permanent and very strong. I can drip some
isopropyl alcohol in here to dissolve the adhesive and make the removal easier, but it's still rather
annoying. ZTE should be charging $450 and a penny on their next phone so they can afford to install
those battery pull tabs. Eventually all phones do need to be recycled, and it's much harder to
recycle them when extra steps are needed for the disassembly. And now everything under here is just
slimy. Along with the new pull tabs they can also get rid of this 'battery not removable' message,
since it obviously is still removable. Anyway, let's get back to finding that camera.
The Axon 20 does have a copper vapor chamber under the battery, along with the ribbon for
the display. I'll remove the two screws down here on the bottom board and unclip the underscreen
fingerprint scanner. Then the charging port board can come loose. Nothing super interesting
to see on this thing. The interesting part is the optical fingerprint scanner.
The optical part means that it's also using a camera to look through
the display to see the fingerprint that's pressed up against the glass.
The top camera, the main under display camera, is a bit larger
but it looks pretty much the same as every other selfie camera that we've seen over the years.
We'll take a closer look in just a second, but first we have to unbury everything else.
The underscreen earpiece is underneath this metal bracket. Once that's removed with it's two screws,
the motherboard can come away from the phone revealing a lot of pink thermal paste
and another strange warning symbol up here in the corner which looks like it's saying not to touch.
I like though that this warning is on the underside of the motherboard
so the only way to see the do not touch warning is by touching it to see what's underneath.
The underscreen earpiece is an oversized tic-tac looking block that vibrates the display
that transmitted sound to your ear. And then of course, we have the four rear cameras:
the top 8 megapixel wide angle camera, the large 64 megapixel main sensor, the 2 megapixel depth
camera, and the 2 megapixel macro camera, none of which have the optical image stabilization.
Before I put the phone back together though, let's see if we can see through these displays.
Remember, ZTE is using two different screens on the Axon 20,
a tiny lower resolution square patch up at the top directly in front of the selfie camera,
and then the rest of the screen is the normal 1080p full HD OLED. And if we set up my own
camera to focus on my pry tool, we can peer through the top camera hole and clearly read
'Jerry Rig Everything' with our own human eyes all right here through that display.
It's got a kind of post-apocalyptic hue from the layers of the screen that we're looking through,
but I'm sure the camera's software compensates for that discoloration after it takes the picture.
An interesting thing is is that if we move the phone down to the bottom hole in the display
for that underscreen fingerprint scanner, we can't see through the pixels anymore since those pixels
are more dense. I guess seeing the ridges up close on our fingerprint doesn't require as much
transparency as producing an actual colored image does. I think this is all pretty cool technology,
even for a first generation version of an underscreen camera. It's pretty fun hanging
out with all of you here and experiencing this history together. Feel free to leave a
comment for your posterity to find in 50 years when they come back to see how it all started.
Assuming, of course, that the world hasn't ended because smartphones were too hard to recycle.
Getting the phone back and assembled like a dementor getting dressed in the morning.
Everything still turns on and the camera still functions like normal. Nice work, ZTE.
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