Samsung Note 20 Ultra Teardown! - No Copper Cooling inside?! By JerryRigEverything

A portion of today's video is sponsored by LastPass. Today we're going to be taking apart the new Samsung Note 20 Ultra – one of the most expensive smartphones of 2020... or ever. We'll see what kind of cooling, if any, this Ultra phone has inside. Huge thanks to LastPass for sponsoring a portion of today's video. One thing that can simplify your online life is not having to remember a ton of passwords for different apps or websites.

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Click on the link in the description to start using LastPass today. And thanks to LastPass for sponsoring a portion of this video. Now it's time to see what happened to this Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. Let's get started. The Samsung Note 20 Ultra.

Today we're going to find out what's inside one of the most expensive smartphones in the world. First we'll turn it off and pop out the SIM card tray. Now the tricky thing with the Note 20 Ultra is that the whole thing is curved on both the front and the back glass, which makes stabbing the phone much more difficult. I found it easier instead of heating it up and slicing at the bottom, I could instead slice from the side of the phone and loosen up the longest portion of adhesive before attempting the shorter ends that are tucked inside of the metal frame. The phone is ip68 water resistant and the adhesive is super strong just like we normally see with Samsung phones.

But eventually with enough prying and slicing, the back glass comes away and we can get a glimpse of what thirteen hundred dollars can buy us. At first glance there is a microphone tucked up right inside the corner of the camera lens. We have the long white s pen slot over here on the right side of the phone. This is where the s pen would sit inside of the phone if the pen was still alive. We'll take a look at that pen's wireless charging pad in just a second.

I'll remove the 18 Phillips head screws holding everything together. But this time around there's something different. Every now and then a smartphone manufacturer will dab some Loctite or a thread locker on the screws to keep them from jiggling out. But as you can see from this, Samsung has kind of gone overboard with my unit. The whole screw is blue.

It's a minor detail, but with our 1300 dollar purchase we got a few extra drops of Loctite. Let's keep going deeper. I'll pop off the wireless charging. This is a rather cool piece of technology. Nothing new here of course, but not only does it have the fast wireless charging to charge itself up, but it has 9 watts of reverse wireless charging to help power other devices or headphones.

Even though it's not totally new, I still think it's a cool feature. You can see the thick bands of copper underneath the black tape. I'll set that off to the side and unplug the battery, then make my way down to the bottom loudspeaker plastics. We can see the metal speaker here on the edge and then the plastic box that holds air around it just like how a subwoofer is mounted inside of a speaker box. The air inside that box gives the speaker room to breathe and make noise.

A trick to making a speaker sound bigger than it actually is is to add foam, or in this case, a lot of foam balls. It gives the sound waves more surface area to reverberate off of before exiting the phone and hitting your ears. Someone can count these little guys for me if they want. There is a lot of them and I'm probably going to need a vacuum later. I'll remove the screen ribbon just like a little Lego, along with the charging port ribbon and the bottom support ribbon.

It's interesting to see Samsung do the same thing we saw inside of the ROG Phone 3 with the little raised internal boards. This one holds the flash and sensors for the rear camera, along with the earpiece speaker which again is centered in the center of the phone instead of all the way up at the top. It also has a chamber of it's own little foam balls so in theory the stereo sound from the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra should be better because they have balls at both ends. You can see the little channel for the speaker sound that goes up to the super thin earpiece slot at the top of the frame. The top camera is very heavily glued into position which we haven't seen before.

It's a 10 megapixel selfie camera. I wonder if the camera was a tiny bit too small for it's slot so they added the extra glue around the edge to compensate. Calculating the tolerances inside of smartphones has got to be a super difficult job so I won't fault them for the extra dab of glue. I am a fan of jerry-rigging after all. Back to the cute little wireless charger over the s pen slot.

I can unstick that from the pen sheath and it's about what we would expect. A bunch of tiny copper coils making an electromagnetic field that the tiny coils on the s pen tip can use to charge up the tiny capacitor at the end of the pen. The motherboard is tucked up into the top of the phone frame. I can just pull it down and out. And here's where things start to get a little weird.

Remember how this phone costs $1300? There is no thermal paste or copper inside to keep the processor cool. Nothing here on the gray stuff inside of the phone or on the back of the motherboard which is super unfortunate, especially because this is an international phone and the exynos processor is notorious for overheating and throttling. It's hard to believe that there is no copper in here for the heat dissipation. I can peel up the gray pad underneath the motherboard. Slicing it open looks like just a bunch of thick flaky graphite that we've seen as secondary thermal layers in other phones.

But it's used as the primary thermal conductor here without thermal paste. If this was a $400 phone I'd be just fine, but this phone is the insane $1300. The thing that makes all of this even worse is that, like I said earlier, my phone is the international version. There is another teardown on YouTube done by iCase. I'll link his channel in the cards and description, but the phone he took apart has the US charger in the box which means it's probably using the Qualcomm chipset and clearly has a superior copper heat pipe cooling system inside.

I don't quite understand how Samsung could get away with selling the same phone in different areas while having different components inside. Maybe there's more though. Let's go a bit deeper. Three more screws down at the bottom, two of which hold in the charging port, then the USB-C can come out of the phone. It does have a red rubber ring around the tip to help keep water out.

And of course the bottom board with its microphone. The board rests on top of the small haptic vibration motor. And there's the water damage indicator sticker up by the top SIM card tray. Getting the battery out is always a nightmare just like the rest of the Samsung phones. I know they're probably still scared of batteries since the good old Note 7 days, but I'm pretty sure the battery isn't going to try to sneak out of the phone to scare anybody.

Luckily I'm prepared with extra pry tools, and with enough gentle persistence I can get the battery out from inside of the phone. It's a 4500 milliamp hour capacity. It looks like now with everything gone that there might be some copper on the back side of the frame between the metal and the screen behind where the camera sensors sit as well as down here by the battery compartment, which would be fairly redeeming if there was a large vapor chamber back there. I think the only option we have at this point is to rip the screen off so we can see it. We have to find the ultrasonic fingerprint scanner anyway so we might as well.

I'll just check the camera units before we obliterate the phone though. The Note 20 Ultra has three cameras this time around, all resting in their own metal frame. The 12 megapixel ultra wide camera up top, and the 108 megapixel main camera in the center. And the 12 megapixel 5 times optical zoom periscope camera down at the bottom. The main camera and the telephoto camera both have OIS.

Just the OIS is internal with the telephoto. I show what that looks like and how it works with my teardown video of the S20 Ultra. Removing the screen kills the screen, so there's not really a need to be super gentle here. I'm just trying to avoid shattering the glass. The victus glass is shatter-resistant so we shouldn't have any problems.

It's the display underneath the glass that usually dies. This display is different from the ROG phone we took apart last week. The display is made of a flexible material like we saw inside of the Galaxy Fold and it doesn't crack or shatter. It turns out that the copper we saw was just a large sticker for the screen. There's no vapor chamber to be found anywhere.

It does have the ultrasonic fingerprint scanner down at the bottom but I guess we could have seen that from inside the phone too. It was still worth taking the screen off. Now I don't claim to be a thermal expert, but I do know the very hot history of the exynos processors, and I guess I'm just disturbed on multiple levels here. One, I don't think this cooling is adequate for their hot processor. And two, why in the world does a $1300 phone not have a copper vapor chamber inside? It's $1300.

And more importantly, why are there Galaxy Note Ultras being sold with different components inside the phones? It's kind of sketchy. Ifixit and I both had graphite heat pads in our Note 20 Ultra 5Gs, and it could be that the copper vapor chamber is included on the ITE version. I'd have to take apart some more phones to be sure, but still, there probably is a performance difference and it's rather confusing to have a phone with the same name and different internals. I'm not a huge fan of where Samsung sells a phone with the same name and basically the same price if it has different parts and acts differently. Samsung should be putting a different name on it.

If you remember, Samsung also removed those 5G millimeter wave antennas from the international version of the S20 Ultra. I know I personally currently use the Note 10 Plus, but I'm thinking my next phone won't be a Samsung. Samsung has changed a lot during the past few years. Anyway, let me know your thoughts down in the comments below. Do you think smartphone manufacturers should be allowed to change the internal design of their phone and sell it with the same name, or do you think that's kind of sketchy? I'm curious.

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Source : JerryRigEverything