Teardowns

Samsung Galaxy S III Teardown

The Samsung Galaxy S III was supposed to land in our hands today, but shipping delays can affect the best of us. Thankfully, our Canadian heroes at Chipworks came to the rescue and offered to provide us lovely disassembly photos of the Galaxy S III in their possession.

Samsung Galaxy S III teardown

We’re not going to give the Galaxy a repairability score because we don’t feel it’s right to judge a device through the intertubes. We’re getting a unit of our own, so we’ll update the teardown with a score once we have it in hand.

Teardown Highlights:

  • The main 8MP camera sensor is a Sony BSI unit, essentially the same camera found in the iPhone 4S. Folks can finally compare Apples to Androids when it comes to picture quality.
  • The back camera, at 1.9MP, should vastly outperform the VGA unit on the iPhone 4S.
  • Samsung’s inscription on the battery reads “Please refer to manual before using battery.” Yeah, like that’s gonna happen…
  • The 3.8 V, 2100 mAh battery incorporates the Near Field Communications (NFC) module used in “S Beam” — just like the Galaxy Nexus we took apart last year.
  • That 2100 mAh is ginormous when compared to the iPhone 4S’ 1420 mAh and Galaxy Nexus’ 1750 mAh units.
  • The glass is fused to the display, and the display to the Galaxy S III’s frame. This will greatly increase the amount of money one has to spend when replacing the glass, should one be unfortunate enough to break it.
  • This is one of the first phones utilizing Corning Gorilla Glass 2, which according to Corning “enables up to a 20 percent reduction in glass thickness, while maintaining the industry-leading damage resistance, toughness, and scratch resistance.” Interestingly, Corning only claims reduced thickness, not better damage resistance. While a 20% reduction in thickness is impressive, we’d like to see more effort towards creating robust and long-lasting devices.
  • A 13″ MacBook Pro’s display resolution is 1280×800. This phone has a 1280×720 resolution 4.8″ display!
  • Chipworks eagerly provided us with pictures of the motherboard less than an hour into the teardown! Here’s what they found:
  • Samsung Exynos 4412 quad-core A9 processor with 1GB LP DDR2 Green Memory (K3PE7E700M-XGC2)
  • Murata M2322007 WiFi Module
  • Samsung KMVTU000LM eMMC(16GB)+MDDR(64MB) NAND Flash
  • Intel Wireless PMB9811X Gold Baseband processor
  • MAX77693 and MAX77686
  • Broadcom BCM47511 Integrated Monolithic GNSS Receiver
  • Wolfson Microelectronics WM1811 stereo codec
  • Skyworks SKY77604 Multi-Band Power amplifier
  • Silicon Image 9244 low-power MHL Transmitter
  • NXP PN544 NFC Chip
  • Infineon PMB5712 RF transceiver
  • And now for a chip that isn’t attached to the motherboard: a Melfas 8PL533 Touch Sensor that translates your touch inputs into zeroes and ones.