Galaxy Note 7 Teardown for screen, battery, charging port replacement

Since the most attracting new flagship of Samsung, the Galaxy Note 7 has been released not long ago, many Samsung fans are eager to see how difficult it is to replace the battery, curved screen or charging port, here we’re going to give it shot -- disassembling the whole Note 7 to see what’s the differences when compared to the Galaxy Note 5 in repair procedure.

Repair Tools Needed：

Heat gun or hair dryer

Phillips screwdriver

Meatal opening tool

Guitar pick or sharp cards

Plastic spudger or tweezers

Step 1 Remove back glass cover

Power off the phone and take out the S pen first.

Then remove the SIM card tray.

Heat up the back glass cover for a while like always.

Then insert the metal opening tool to pry up the back glass cover.

Use a sharp paper card or guitar pick to cut the waterproof back cover adhesive stickers. (You may need to heat up the back cover several times when cutting the adhesives, just take your time)

After loosen all the adhesive stickers around the edges, you can remove the back cover now.

Step 2 Remove battery

Undo 11 screws on the plastic back frame by Phillips screwdriver.

Then the loudspeaker module comes out easily.

Next move, take the wireless charging & NFC pad away.

Then release the battery connector and the S pen connector.

Now the battery can be taken out, use a metal opening tool to pry it up, be careful not to hurt the battery, the tough adhesive is underneath.

Step 3 Remove small parts

After remove battery, then we can release all the connectors here, the screen ribbon connector, camera connector, earpiece connector, sensor connector, another screen ribbon connector and power flex ribbon connector.

After that you need to undo 2 screws before removing the motherboard.

By the way, remove the front facing camera and iris scanner.

Moving down, there are 3 new connectors, 2 signal cable connectors and the home button cable connector.

Lift up the motherboard, don’t be so urgent to tear apart the motherboard cause there is still a connector to the charging port on the bottom.

Next step you can remove the rear facing camera from the motherboard now.

Back to the middle frame assembly, we can start with the front array, which comes with an infrared LED helping with the iris scanner in low light situation.

Then undo 3 screws to remove the headphone jack cable and charging port flex cable.

Release the headphone jack flex cable connector and remove it.

Next we’re going to take out the type-C charging port flex cable. Pry it out from that gap and then lift the signal cable which connected to the charging port flex.

Now remove the USB type-C charging port, which is another new try for Samsung.

Step 4 remove AMOLED screen assembly

Heat up the screen for a while.

Then use a sharp card to insert into the gap between the screen and the middle frame from the inside.

Use another card to insert to the little gap to loosen the supporting frame adhesives.

Have to say that this is a real hard job to loosen all the screen adhesives around the whole edges, there is a big risk damaging the screen, you need to be very careful.

Note: when cutting the screen adhesives, be careful not insert the card too deep in case you broken the screen flex cable ribbon.

If you feel harder releasing the adhesives, try to apply more heat to the screen.

Also there you need to be careful with the touch key pad when removing the screen off the middle frame.

Now we can remove the home button flex cable.

One more thing, the Galaxy Note 7 home button material is still made from metal and paint coating covered, there is the risk of getting scratched easily. Be aware of protecting your home button well.

Removing the home button flex cable, then the whole teardown work has been completed by now.

From this disassembly work we can see that the Galaxy Note 7 is easier to be fixed in some way compared to the predecessor Note 5, the USB type-C charging port flex can be replaced without disassembling the screen, the battery can be taken out without removing the motherboard. However replacing the screen is still difficult because of the curved display. Better providing some protections to your beloved Galaxy Note 7!

Did high pixels makes your phone camera take better pictures?

Needless to say that camera has become one of the most important part in smart phone nowadays, which is also an important consideration when consumers buying a smartphone. However there is a misunderstanding among many people that the camera photos quality will be better when the cell phone pixels is higher. Here we are going to explain what exactly affected most to the camera photos quality.

The picture below shows the structure of the main components.

The main parts of camera are the PCB board, CMOS image sensor and the camera lenses.

The PCB is shorted for the printed circuit board, which is used to support the components and connect electrical signal.

The CMOS image sensor is used to receive light passing through the lens, and convert them into electrical signals.

And the camera lenses is used to receive and adjust the camera object so as to realize the optical imaging.

So what is the cell phone camera pixels?

We’ll find that many cell phone manufacturer are committed to increase their phones pixels, however is it true that more pixels equal higher camera photos quality? To realize the truth we need to know these involving factors--pixels, CMOS image sensor size and the single pixel size.

The image sensor is in a rectangle shape and the pixels is just like the small square grid, each small square grid is a single pixel, more square grid means higher pixels and the single pixel size is smaller when the image sensor is under a certain size. And the bigger the image sensor size, more light can be received and the higher the photo image quality.

The mainstream image sensor size of a flagship smart phone is 1/3 inches.

Like the iPhone 4S, 5, 5C, which features 1/3.2 inches while for iPhone 5S, 6, 6 Plus, 1/3 inches image sensor has been adopted.

Compared with the SLR camera, the Full Frame Digital Camera is about 35 times of the 1/3 inches image sensor. And for the single pixel, the mainstream mobile phone camera pixel are is 1.12um and 1.4um at the moment.

Using the same generation technology, if the single pixel can receive more lights when its size getting bigger, better image quality, better noise control and dynamic range performance it will be.

The picture below for the iPhone pixel size is from Apple’s official website.

From which we can tell even though iPhone’s camera pixels is lower than many other smart phones, however the photos quality is higher, meanwhile the single pixel size is bigger than the mainstream pixels.

From the above, we can see that there is still a long way to go that the cell phone camera competed with the SLR camera like the cellphone manufacturer advertised.

And we can see that the number of camera pixels that most of us concerned is not the direct factor affecting the image quality most, more advanced and larger size image sensor, lens module, manufacturers of software set-up and equipped with optical image stabilization technology are the most important factors to mobile imaging quality.

How well do you know about your Fast-Charging phone?

1．The reason Fast-Charging spring up

With the development and popularization of smart phones, which penetrates into our life deeply, the way to improve battery life and shorten battery charging time has become an important goal among all the cellphone manufacturers. As the battery capacity can’t be expanded without limits, the quick charge technology emerges to save people’s time. However, do you really know what is quick charge? Let’s get through this with a simple explanation.

Working principle

There are 3 main quick charge technology, Qualcomm’s Quick Charge (2.0/3.0), OPPO’s VOOC charge and MediaTek PumpExpress.

According to the formula P (power) = U (voltage) X I (current), improving the power means shorten the charging time while the battery capacity is fixed. All the fast charging technology is based on implementing bigger voltages and currents while charging.

A. Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0

Qualcomm Quick Charge technology is designed for Qualcomm Snapdragon processor terminal, which has been developed to the 3rd generation already.

Charging process:

The QC 2.0 charger connects with the cellphone by on-loading voltages on micro USB port (D+ and D-) , to adjusts the output voltage.

Step 1. When connected the phone to charger via USB cable, the D+ and D- port will be short circuit by default through MOS, the phone will be charged normally at the moment (the voltage is 5V). If the phone support QC2.0, the HVDCP(high voltage dedicated charger port) on the android device will on-load 0.325V to D+ port lasting over 1.25s.

Step 2. Lasting over 1.25s, the D+ and D- port will be disconnected and the D- voltage will drop.

Step 3. After the device detected the D-voltage has dropped, the HVDCP can read the value in the file of /sys/class/power_supply/usb/voltage_max, if it’s 9000000Mv, then the voltage on D+ port will be set to 3.3V and D- will be 0.6V,　then the output voltage will be adjusted to 9V. If not, the voltage of D+ will be set to 0.6V while the D- for 0V.

Step 4. The charger will apply different Voltage to charge the device.

B. OPPO VOOC charge

The vooc charge technology shorten the charging time by the way of increasing the electric current, it can be described briefly with the picture below.

As we can see from the picture below, the OPPO Vooc charger cable is different from the normal USB charger cables, the charging interface port has been increased to 8 pins while the normal one only features 4-5 pins, which allows more currents passing.

C. MTK Pump Express

Actually the working principle of MTK PE charging technology is almost the same as Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0, the difference is that the MTK PE charging ‘handshake protocol’ is realized by regular VBUS current pulse between the phone and charger. And another difference is that the highest MTK PE charging voltage is 9 and there is one more voltage rank 7V within.

2. Does fast charging technology hurt battery?

The quick charge process can only work when both the cellphones and the charger support fast charging. On the current situation, the charging power are totally affordable within the range of battery capacity, generally speaking, since the ‘handshake protocol’ can act as a coordination between the charge adapter and the phone battery to adjust the voltage and current value. As long as you choose the original charging power adapter to charge for your phone there won’t be damages to your battery.