The Galaxy Note 10 is usually the Swiss Army Knife of all smartphones. It's the phone that
has everything and can do everything...or at least it used to be before Samsung removed
the headphone jack. Today we're going to review the Galaxy Note 10+ from the inside, see what
makes it tick, and see if there was actually room for that jack. Let's get started.
Let's get started.
You have to hold the power and volume down button at the same time to
turn off the phone...because that makes a whole lot of sense.
Let's get started.
[Intro]
This video is actually going to be super interesting. The Note 10+ is arguably one of the most feature-rich
smartphones on the market right now. To remove the vivid back panel, we'll break out the
heat gun. Glass and metal sandwiches tend to all be built the same. With a glass panel,
I do have to take special care not to flex the glass too much or the whole thing might
shatter.
Once the adhesive is warmed up and softened underneath the glass, my suction cup can pull
up and my razor blade and pry tools can slice through the adhesive that's holding the panel
to the frame. It's a very tedious process. The inexpensive plastic Galaxy A50 was just
as colorful as this Note 10, and it used a plastic panel which is way more durable than
glass. One thing that makes this Note 10 even harder than usual to open up is the curve
of the glass that wraps around the side portions of the phone. Any pressure in the wrong spot
along that curve might shatter the whole panel. With enough time, patience, and a slight headache
from looking at this flashy tie-dyed tech, we finally get the back panel to separate
from the phone. The rear glass doesn't have any electronics attached to it. All the wireless
charging is built into the phone body.
To go deeper, we'll have to remove 14 normal Phillips head screws. Thumbs up to Samsung
for not using proprietary screws. Once those are out I can fold over the metal plate and
unplug the golden battery connector. The wireless charging coil is plugged in right next to
it. Unplugging that releases the wireless coil from the phone. You might be thinking
to yourself, 'Hey Jerry, why do you keep calling this black sheet a coil?' That's because it
is. You can see the circular shape of the copper windings underneath the black covering.
These internal copper windings inside the Note 10+ will rest on top of the copper windings
found inside of a wireless charging pad. The pair of coils creates an electromagnetic field
through which energy can transfer into the phone. This might come as a surprise, but
this large wireless charging coil isn't the only wireless coil found inside the Note 10.
On the left side of the phone we see a large rectangular housing. This is used to store
the s-pen, and at the very top of that housing where the tip of the pen sits when it's parked
inside of the phone is a little baby wireless charger. I can peel off the black tape to
reveal the miniature copper coils that sit right on top of the coils wrapped around the
tip of the stylus. Once again creating two sets of coils that form another smaller electromagnetic
field. Power flows from the phone battery through the two coils and into the s-pen capacitor
which we discovered when we carefully disassembled the s-pen in the durability test video. This
wireless transfer is also why the s-pen cannot be made from metal since metal obstructs wireless
charging. It's some pretty mind blowing tech and we've barely even started this teardown.
Let's pull off the top black plastics. This reveals a dual colored motherboard – both
blue and green. A transparent Note 10 would look pretty awesome. I'll unplug the power
and volume buttons. The connectors just unplug like a little Lego. I can remove the front
facing camera. It's a 10 megapixel little guy with no optical image stabilization. The
black square here in the center of the motherboard is the earpiece strangely enough. It's in
a weird location. We'll dig more into that in just a second. I'll pop off the three ribbon
cables down here along the bottom of the motherboard, along with another ribbon on the right side,
each unsnapping like a little Lego. Then I can remove the SIM and SD card tray. Remember
that Samsung made three versions of this phone. The regular size Note 10 does not have an
SD card slot.
The dual colored motherboard can lift away from the phone housing at this point. The
reason why this motherboard has two colors is that it's actually two motherboards stacked
on top of each other. Kind of like what we say inside of the newer iPhones. It's a thick
sandwich of really expensive technology. Surprisingly though, even with the extra thick motherboard,
there's no thermal paste on the back, just a gray foamy pad looking thing.
Let's take a look at the cameras. This block of cameras is another piece of mind blowing
tech. The Note 10+ wide angle camera is up top with no optical image stabilization. Then
there's a regular 12 megapixel normal camera which does have OIS. And then a 12 megapixel
two times optical zoom camera at the bottom. This also has OIS. Samsung is the only manufacturer
to release a variable aperture camera unit. Just like, you know, your pupils are just
inside of your eyeball to get the optimal light for your eye. This little circle opens
and closes to get the optimal amount of light for Samsung's camera sensor, depending on
the situation. It's pretty cool.
The lens on the right side is a depth sensor. We've seen this pop up in a lot of phones
lately and it's only available on the Note 10+. We're going to check out the copper cooling
pad here in a second, but first we need to uncover the charging port. The black plastics
come off easy enough since we already took out the screws. The plastics contain the bottom
loudspeaker. It's got the same little baffle balls hidden inside the speaker like we saw
in the OnePlus phones. It's a little ball pit for ants.
I'll remove the two extension ribbons and the three additional screws. Then the whole
little charging port can come away from the frame of the phone. With the Galaxy S10, this
port was not replaceable so I'm glad Samsung changed their minds and didn't permanently
attach the charging port to the motherboard again. Another change is that now we have
a square vibration motor. This probably contains a similar taptic feel that the iPhones have.
And we also have the same water resistant mesh over the speaker and microphone openings
that we've seen inside the phones for a couple years now. These help the Note keep water
out for its ip68 rating.
What about the question: Is there actually room in here for the headphone jack? The answer
is yes, there is always room. The circuit boards can be designed and rearranged however
Samsung wants. Proof of that is here with the double stacked motherboard. Stacking the
motherboard allows for more room. They could just have easily stacked parts of the lower
charging port board and added the headphone jack at the bottom. Or stacked more of the
upper board onto each other to make room for the port up top. Easy peasy. It's no coincidence
that Apple removed the headphone jack at the same time they launched their wireless air
pods. Or that OnePlus lost the headphone jack when they launched their bullet headphones.
Or even the Pixel lost the headphone jack when they launched the Pixel Buds. And now
Samsung lost the jack as they push their wireless Galaxy Buds. Coincidence? Absolutely not.
Removing the jack coerces customers into buying additional technology from the same company
who made your phone. Companies know this and companies like this. Another thing companies
do is make your phone harder to repair so that instead of fixing it, you just go buy
a new one. And Samsung is just as guilty as the rest of them with this permanently glued
in battery. Each bend of this battery as I try to remove it, is super dangerous. The
internal layers could pinch together and short out at any moment, causing a fire. You would
think that Samsung would want to avoid exploding batteries and just add easy to remove pull
tabs like Apple does, especially considering their history. And as the largest smartphone
manufacturer in the world, Samsung should be leading the way with battery pull tabs
or gentle adhesive so that one, I don't blow my fingers off, and two, so that I can stop
saying Apple has them beat in one area. That's more painful than losing a finger.
The battery of the Note 10+ is a 4300 milliamp hour. The regular Note 10 would be a 3500
milliamp hour. Another mind blowing piece of tech inside this Note 10+ is this super
slim under screen fingerprint scanner glued directly underneath the screen. During my
Galaxy S10 teardown video I broke open the whole phone to show the insides and talk more
about how this works. Today though, I'm going to keep the Note 10 in one piece so hopefully
it will still turn on when I put the whole thing back together. Seeing the outline of
the scanner with my LED light is pretty cool though.
There are a few things left before we reassemble the phone. A water damage indicator sticker
here next to the SIM card tray opening. And then we have the earpiece which is strangely
pretty far away from the actual earpiece grill location. Popping it out reveals that it is
indeed a speaker and not the under display vibrating technology we saw inside the LG
G8. It looks like the speaker fires downward into a hollow channel between the frame and
the screen. Then the sound is directed up towards the top of the phone to eject out
the hole near the SIM card tray. There's also a super incredibly thin opening between the
front glass and metal top of the phone. It's pretty hard to see since it's only 5 human
hairs thick. I actually use human hair to measure everything which explains a lot.
Finally we come to the heat pipe or vapor chamber as Samsung calls it. We normally only
see this type of cooling in high end gaming phones like the Razer Phone 2 or the Black
Shark 2. It's cool to see the technology making making it's way into non-gaming phones. As
we know, solid copper is a great conductor of heat. It pulls away heat from hot objects
like processors and goes and dissipates that heat elsewhere inside the phone. Heat pipes
are more efficient than a copper slab because of the liquid inside the pipe. The vapor chambers
like the one we see here take cooling to a whole new level - beyond that even of heat
pipes Slicing the vapor chamber open, we can see that it's a hollow pouch with plenty of
room inside for liquid to move around. The liquid will vaporize at one end where the
processor is heating up, and then cool down as it reaches the far end of the chamber.
Only to be wicked back again to the processor by the copper strands and copper mesh capillary
action so it can start the whole process over again. It's kind of like a liquid cooling
system built for PCs but crammed down into a really small space. The liquid is still
present here in the pouch even after I opened it up and messed around at the insides.
The wire wicking mesh is pretty interesting. The copper vapor chamber does a good job of
helping the phone run efficiently, but it's not mandatory for functionality. The phone
should still work and turn on without this in place. We'll see if that's true in just
a few seconds as we assemble the phone.
The Note lineup used to be the absolute pinnacle of everything that Android phones were capable
of, so I'm sad to see now that Samsung dropped even one useful feature like the headphone
jack. But even without that feature, it's still one of the most, if not the most, well-designed
and feature-rich cellphones you can buy right now. So if you're looking for the best of
the best, and willing to pay a premium for 100% of what smartphones are capable of right
now, this is probably the phone to get. Just keep in mind that you can probably get a perfectly
decent phone that does 90% of what the Note 10 does for about half the cost from someone
else.
Smartphones decrease in value faster than a piece of used gum, so unless you make money
with your smartphone, you can always just go get last year's version for a fraction
of the price. There aren't very many substantial improvements between one year and another.
Would you look at that. The whole thing still turns on. Gotta love that. The Note 10+ is
a very tempting phone. I'll probably upgrade at some point in the future when there's a
price drop or I can find a good deal. But for now I'll just stick with my 2 ½ year
old Galaxy 8+ for a little while longer.
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