What you need to know
- iFixit this week released its teardown of the Galaxy S20 Ultra.
- It shows off the phone's massive camera modules and more.
- The phone, unfortunately, got a terrible repair rating of 3 out of 10, though.
Samsung's Galaxy S20 Ultra may be "too much of a good thing," but what it's not is easily repairable. That's according to the folks at iFixit, who gave the phone a mere 3 out of 10 in their repairability score.
In particular, the phone repair maestros criticized the phone's intricate interior design, which according to them, meant that "all-too-common display repairs require either a complete teardown or replacing half the phone." In addition, the battery is glued down, and iFixit did not like that "every repair starts with painstakingly un-gluing the fragile glass rear cover."
But that's probably not why you're here. You want to see the phone's innards on full display, so here you go:
Of particular note in the phone is, of course, the gigantic 108MP camera, and the 100X Space Zoom capabilities of the phone. How was Samsung able to achieve the feat? Here's what iFixit found:
How do you fit a stack of zoom lenses into a smartphone that's only 8.8 mm thin? Samsung says: turn it sideways. Instead of focusing your image directly onto the sensor, this camera uses a prism to bounce the light sideways at a 90-degree angle.It certainly is impressive! After passing through the prism—which has its own optical image stabilizer—the image barrels through a sliding box full of zoom lens, and finally hits the sensor mounted at the end of the tunnel.
The camera, for example, covers twice as much space as the iPhone 11's primary sensor.
The phone's also got an assortment of 13 different chips, most of them made by Qualcomm. The highlight among them, of course, is the Snapdragon 865, atop which sits the 12GB LPDDR5 RAM module.
To sum it all up, the Galaxy S20 Ultra is one of the most powerful (and most expensive) phones you can buy right now. It also has exquisite craftsmanship and components; just don't expect it to be easy to repair by yourself.