The Galaxy line has finally passed the baton—er S pen—letting the Ultra series take over
for the popular Note.
With the same form factor as a Note, and the same features as Ultra’s past, are we looking
at old news?
Not so fast, there’s always more going on under the surface.
Thanks to Creative Electron’s X-rays, we can see under that surface without even opening
it.
And, okay yeah this looks pretty familiar inside.
Except, where’s the vibration motor?
Looks like it may have gotten a significant redesign and migrated to the other end of
the phone—might be worth investigating.
With a lot of heat, a suction handle, and some adhesive slicing—no surprises here—we…oops.
The noble plastic back experiment of the S21 seems to have failed, Samsung is still using
fragile glass backs, and, thanks to some impressive camera bumps, our mat isn’t able to evenly
distribute heat.
Samsung used to use expensive jigs to get around this, but it turns out they’ve started
recommending lower heat and simple gel packs—at least in French.
The adhesive still feels pretty stubborn, but a longer repair that’s actually DIY-friendly
is still an improvement.
We’re guessing the French repairability index is forcing Samsung away from the dark
side and towards repair!
Below the rear panel are the standard coil and covers, which pop right off after removing
the Phillips screws securing them in place.
Now we can see some of the internal differences: The Ultra has an extra connector for the S
Pen and an extremely hefty extra camera.
After disconnecting several cables the motherboard lifts out with the rear-facing cameras still
attached.
While the S22 has a nice, but standard, trio of cameras—a 50 MP wide, 12 MP Ultra Wide,
and a 3x zoom 10 MP Telephoto—the Ultra has some pretty compelling upgrades.
Its wide camera has a massive 108 MP sensor.
The Ultra also has an additional 10MP Telephoto camera with periscope lens.
Samsung introduced a periscope lens camera in the S20 Ultra, and it uses a clever combination
of software and lens technology to achieve its 100x Zoom.
Using an optically stabilized prism, light is bent 90-degrees and shot through a series
of stacked telephoto lenses.
You can see our green laser dot dancing on the image sensor after getting deflected by
the teensy prism.
All that engineering only gets us to 10X optical zoom.
For the rest, Samsung uses a combination of cropping, pixel binning(a fancy way to describe
combined groups of pixels that gather more light), and standard digital zoom to get you
all the way to 100x.
Back to those motherboards, we peel up a lot of thermal management material and our reflow
station makes quick work of this board parfait.
Notable chips include the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 System on Chip, and a “measly” 8GB of
RAM—we didn’t spring for the once-standard 12 GB.
Hungry for more silicon snacks?
Our stellar iFixit community has already taken a microscope to this board and figured out
what all these chips actually do—check the link in the description, and let us know if
you spot anything we missed!
Before we get to the batteries we head down south to the little daughter board, which—after
disconnecting some interconnect cables—lifts right out.
These little boards are home to the SIM readers, charging ports, and primary microphones.
Getting these batteries out is easy thanks to pull tabs—just kidding.
hese batteries require the same tedious combo of isopropyl alcohol, suction cup lifting
force, and patience.
The S22 battery packs 13.92 watt hour capacity while the Ultra weighs in at 18.83 watt hours.
Scraping the bottom of the phone we peel out the earpiece speaker and, hey, wait.
What ever happened to the vibration motor?
We go back to the parts pile and snag the lower speaker, sure enough it’s got four
contact points compared to the upper speaker’s 2.
By the looks of it, Samsung is still trying to chase a robust Taptic-Engine-like feedback
without sacrificing as much space as Apple does.
This new direction may help them turn their typically lackluster haptics into something
small and mighty.
You’ll have to let us know if it works out, ours… isn’t going back together.
We also wake our sleeping S Pen from its winter’s nap.
Aww, so cute.
10 years of testing in the Note series was enough to deem it worthy of Samsung’s main
flagship.
After a miserable rear panel experience, we’re finally brave enough to tackle the 120 hz
refresh rate AMOLED display.
The tight seams and ultra-tough adhesive make screen removal pretty awful, but for once
we don’t separate the layers.
Phew!
Luckily, the only time you should need to do this is if you’re replacing an already-cracked
display.
Peeling up some more graphite, we get a clear view of the new Stainless steel vapor chamber
cooling system.
Like traditional heat pipes, Vapor chambers are used to transfer and disperse heat from
a high energy source—like the S22’s Snapdragon SOC.
Stainless steel allows this vapor chamber to be stronger, more efficient and an ultra
thin .4 mm.
Come to think of it, we’ve seen a lot of heat dissipation efforts in here: oodles of
graphite tape, some serious thermal paste, and now this beefier vapor chamber?
At a guess we’d say that catching up to Apple silicon is starting to make Samsung
sweat, pun intended.
Faster processors mean more heat, and if you can’t get them to run super efficiently,
then you have to bleed that heat off.
Our two cents: make this phone just a few millimeters thicker!
You’ll have more room for heat dissipation and the space for stretch release adhesive
under the battery, it’s a win-win!
All told, disassembling the Galaxy S Line, hasn’t changed much.
In fact both the Galaxy S22 and the S22 Ultra Score a 3 out of 10 on our repairability scale.
While the only screws are standard Phillips, that’s about the only up-side.
Battery replacement remains too difficult for a component with a limited life-span,
and every repair will require battling through tough adhesive.