The highly anticipated Galaxy Z Fold 3 was announced last week and already it has gone under the scalpel. YouTube channel PBKreviews has opened up the foldable phone to assess the internal hardware components and most of all determine its repairability score. In picking apart the device, the YouTuber tells about other useful information too, which will be of importance to ones who want to buy Samsung’s most flamboyant phone to date.
First up it is about taking apart the rear panel joined by the adhesive – to do this, heat is applied to the backplate. Thereafter, the cables and brackets are removed to get a peek into the foldable’s innards.
The phone has one of the two batteries underneath the backplate and the outer screen is a bit easy to remove here. Under the battery is a chipset that is used for the foldable phone’s S Pen support.
Here it is obvious, the 14 Philips screws hold together the other components like the speaker system, RAM, processor, cameras and more. Since it is foldable with two displays, the internal components and their positioning is far more complex than any other normal smartphone.
After removing the screws, the punch-hole selfie camera of the outer screen is visible, and then the battery is revealed, which can be removed after a slight effort. The triple-camera setup on the left is a bit complicated to remove though.
Removing the wireless charging pad gives access to the two boards which are secured with 16 Philips screws. The motherboard on the phone has a multi-layered design with the processor, RAM and internal storage on it.
To the left and right of the motherboard are positioned the mmWave 5G antennas that can be removed without much hassle. Under this lies the second battery which requires effort to dislodge – and then finally revealing the main display panel.
The teardown reveals that the Galaxy Z Fold 3 has a weak repair score of 2/10 since the components can be easily damaged if not handled properly in case of a repair job. Also, it is a time-consuming process with this Samsung folding phone.
