if you've been looking at your phone and
wishing there was a screen on its side
well I've got good news for you it's
been almost a year since we tore down
the Galaxy s5 and today we've got
something a little bit edgier the galaxy
s6 edge will the edges futuristic curved
glass and aluminum construction proved
to be a repair nightmare well there's
only one way to find out and that's to
tear it down
hi I'm Kate with iFixit in for Gwendolyn
who is on temporary leave
and today we're tearing down the Galaxy
s6 edge size-wise the s6 edge is just
about the same as the galaxy s5
measuring in at 142 point 1 millimeters
long 70 point one millimeters wide and
just 7 millimeters thick and weighing in
at just 132 grams getting into the s6
edge proved to be an interesting
challenge since the s6 edge has no
visible screws we knew it was time for
our I open errs to deal with the
securely glued on rear panel in fact the
rear panel was glued on so securely we
needed to get our heavy duty suction cup
out just to be able to slide an opening
pick in after a lot of crying with our
slimmest opening picks we were finally
able to separate the glass rear panel
and get our first look inside the s6
edge in every previous galaxy phone
teardown this would be the part where we
would easily flip out the battery
unfortunately it looks like we're going
to have to do a good deal more digging
to get that battery out with the help of
our handy Phillips driver and an opening
tool we were able to remove the mid
frame without much difficulty and
finally get our first look at the
battery and the motherboard the mid
frame is home to a whole host of goodies
including some spring contacts an NFC
wireless charging coil and even a
speaker there are even some labeled
antennas that according to Samsung have
been welded to the mid frame via
ultrasonic welding for stability and to
save space with the mid frame out of the
way and a number of connectors
disconnected we were able to free the
motherboard and rear camera the
motherboard is home to a 64-bit samsung
exynos 7420
complete with its octa-core processor
its integrated mali t760 GPU 3 gigabytes
of lpddr4
ram 32 gigabytes of also samsung made
nand flash storage and the InvenSense MP
65 m accelerometer and gyroscope since
the camera came out with a motherboard
we take this opportunity to get a closer
look at it the galaxy s6 edges rear
camera is a 16 megapixel camera with
optical image stabilisation HDR and the
ability to record video at 4k next up we
turn our attention to the battery which
surprise-surprise is glued in place
after searching for some handy pull tabs
and not finding any we gave in and
started prying the battery out as we
were prying we could only assume that
someone at Samsung was feeling our pain
this is a three point eight five volts
10 point zero one watt hour battery that
Samsung claims will give you 12 hours of
LTE web-surfing or up to fifty eight
hours of music playback we're running
out of things to remove now but we're
not quite done the microUSB came out
without too many issues but we were
disappointed to see that the port is
actually stepped backwards from last
year's Galaxy s5 this is a
garden-variety micro USB 2.0 port and
the s5 was actually a micro B USB 3.0
port we can't imagine that the slight
space savings in the device can make up
for a 90% drop in data transfer rates
lastly we wanted to get a better look at
the edge of the edge so we got out all
the eyeopener's we could find and
started softening the adhesives holding
the front panel to the display the fuse
display and the front panel really don't
like being separated and as a result we
ended up prying up a little bit of the
display oops the curved glass found on
the edge is created by a process called
3d thermo forming where the glass is
heated and molded while it is an
especially cool looking part it does
come at a price eight times more than it
used to be that's right what used to be
a $3.00 part is now a $26 part thanks
mostly due to low yields hailing the
display up shows just how it bends and
curves around the sides this is a 5.1
inch Super AMOLED display with a
resolution of 1440 by 2
five sixty and an approximate pixel
density of 577 pixels per inch
we've come to the end of our teardown
and that means it's time to talk
repairability
here at iFixit it's our mission to teach
people how to repair everything so every
gadget that we tear down we give a
repair ability score between one and ten
ten being the easiest to repair and one
being the hardest the Samsung Galaxy s6
edge scored a three out of ten and
here's why
on the upside many components are
modular and can be replaced
independently but on the downside front
and back glass makes for double the
crack ability and strong adhesive on the
rear glass makes it very difficult to
gain entry into the device the battery
is very tightly adhered to the back of
the display and buried beneath the mid
frame and motherboard and replacing the
glass without destroying the display is
going to be very difficult for the
complete teardown including tons of
beautiful high quality images head on
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