Galaxy S21 Teardown: Best of the New Galaxies By iFixit

The Samsung Galaxy s21 might look like just a refreshed s20, but I think this is the most interesting phone of the routine galaxy s updates this year, it's less expensive than the ultra and the plus, but it still gets the upgraded in-display fingerprint sensor from Qualcomm some new display tech and the new snapdragon 8 processors, with its integrated 5g modem, also from Qualcomm one difference between the s21 and its siblings is a major upside. The back cover is made from plastic, not glass, plastic might not feel premium like glass, but it's fantastic for durability and repairability. Not only will it beat out glass in a drop test, it brings some nice flexibility too. Removing some difficulty of opening up the phone, a heat pad, gives us controlled heat application to soften the adhesive holding the phone together. This way, we don't accidentally melt the plastic back with our fiery heat gun. The adhesive holding down the back panel is a little tough, but thanks to the flexible plastic, inserting an opening pick is much easier and since there's no glass to crack the opening process overall is pretty painless under the cover.

Well, it's a Samsung which means you're, mostly looking at black plastic shields and some wireless charging hardware and, as always, a slew of Phillips screws stand between us and the next layer after that, it's connector city. First, the battery, followed by the two board interconnect cables and the newly disconnectable display cable. It's a small change, but that's nice to have instead of the old, integrated cable that would flop around and get in the way. After those we can turn to the motherboard and the rear cameras. First, the board: the cameras come off with two connectors, then some off-screen d shielding yields the good stuff.

The new snapdragon 888 is hiding here under eight gigabytes of Samsung memory. Next to that is 128 gigabytes of Samsung storage and a Murat Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module. The s21 camera setup is similar to the s20s on paper. Both have 12 megapixels, ultra-wide and standard wide cameras and a 64 megapixel telephoto. The s21's camera upgrades come from the new image signal processor in the snapdragon 8, which works behind the scenes to enhance these cameras' performance back in the phone.

The daughter board is held down by a few screws and is home to the USB-C port and the sim tray it's nice to have both of these parts on a separate board that will be less expensive to replace. Should one of them break, as you might expect. The battery well is a tar pit, a nice isopropyl alcohol bath takes the edge off the adhesive, and then our heavy duty, suction cup takes care of the rest underneath the battery. You can already see that new second gen fingerprint sensor more on that. In a sec, though, the battery is a 15.52 watt hour cell from Samsung, just slightly more potent than the s20s 15.44 watt hour battery before heading to the display we fish out, two 5g millimeter wave antennas hiding in the aluminum frame. The heat pad comes out again to help remove the display.

Removing galaxy phone displays is never easy, but the s21 has a couple advantages. The fully detachable display cable makes this process slightly. Less fussy and the flat screen means you're less likely to shadow the glass as you fight through the adhesive. As always, though, the fragile OLED isn't protected behind that glass, so even if you're, extremely careful, you'll likely end up with a busted panel. Amidst all the copper behind the display is that new fingerprint sensor, this is Qualcomm's second gen 3d sonic sensor.

It should be about 50 faster than the first gen sensor in the s20 devices, with a higher success rate thanks to its larger surface area and ability to capture more data. So how repairable is the Samsung Galaxy s21? It scores a 4 out of 10 on our repair ability, scale, its plastic rear cover makes opening the phone a bit less painful and, like most galaxy phones, all the fasteners are identical Phillips screws. Many of its components are modular and can be replaced individually, but the two most common repairs, screen and battery are still unnecessarily sticky and complicated, and indeed it looks like a screen. Replacement is exactly what we're going to need here since thoroughly disassembling. This phone has killed the display, if only we knew of a company that sells new ones.

Hmm, you.

Source : iFixit