iFixit has completed a teardown of the Samsung Galaxy S8/+ and notes that the battery voltage, capacity, and design tolerances, and even the manufacturer, are virtually identical to the Note7 which was recalled due to battery issues.
Of course, that is a good headline to draw attention to iFixit’s professional teardown – later it notes that Samsung is clearly confident that the Note 7 battery issue was a manufacturing quality assurance one, and the S8 series’ battery is proof that it has faith in its 8-point plan.
The Galaxy 5.8” S8 teardown is here and the 6.2” S8+ is here and it is no surprise that apart from battery capacity and screen size they are internally identical with the S8+ having more space to accommodate the 17% larger capacity battery.
Note that in Australia (and most other international markets) Samsung uses its Exynos 8895, 10nm system on a chip. The 10 nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 (which is made in Samsung foundries) is used in certain markets mainly to accommodate different carrier bands – both varieties perform similarly.
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According to a performance check by Phone Arena, “On paper, those two chips sure sound pretty similar. The details may differ, but they're both trying to do largely the same things, and are crafted with some very similar-looking technologies. And that makes a lot of sense for the components that will drive a high-profile phone like the Galaxy S8: you don't want one edition being wildly more capable than the other.”
Spoiler alert – Phone Arena found that when it comes to performance, there's not an obvious winner. The Exynos, however, showed superior battery-life endurance.
Back to iFixit’s teardown.
It notes that the fingerprint reader has been moved to an awkward new home on the rear. Yes, it can be awkward unless you use some lateral thinking and enroll an upside-down fingerprint on opposite hand you pick the phone up with. Then the reader is very fast, accurate and convenient.
It notes that the rear camera module is the same as the S7 – a 12MP, OIS, large pixel, dual pixel, PADF, and HDR. But Samsung has done a lot of work on the camera app and the new processor has more power to render images including pixel stacking (combines multiple images taken at different focus distances to give a resulting image with a greater depth of field (DOF) than any of the individual source images) that made the Google Pixel/XL camera just that little bit better.
The front camera module has gone to 8MP with iris and facial recognition, OIS, autofocus and added a live GIF mode (same as the Note 7).
It awards both a four out of ten repairability score noting that many components are modular and can be replaced independently. It loses some points because tough adhesive and a glued-on rear panel make battery replacement unnecessarily difficult and extreme care is needed to remove the front glass without destroying the display.