The Galaxy Note 7 was announced earlier this month at an event in New York City, and the device is due to hit store shelves in the US and a few other countries tomorrow, August 19th. Before you rush out and spend over $850 on this brand new smartphone, why not have a look and see what’s inside the device. iFixit typically gets new smartphones, and other gadgets, ahead of release or shortly after, and will tear them apart to see what’s inside and see how repairable the device is. The Galaxy Note 7 got a score of 4 out of 10 for repairability. That’s about what you’d expect in this day and age, especially with most of these smartphones featuring glass backs and not having a removable back. It definitely makes repairing it a bit tougher.
iFixit does confirm that the S Pen is not able to slide into the slot backwards. Something that we’ve seen confirmed by others that got the unit early, as well as media that attended the Unpacked event earlier this month who got hands on with the device then. They do also confirm that the iris scanner is indeed using a camera. It’s not your usual camera though, it’s an IR camera module with a proximity sensor that allows the sensor to scan your eye and use your eye to authenticate yourself. The rear-facing camera is the Sony IMX260 sensor, which is what was used in the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge from earlier this year.
The rest of the internals found in the Galaxy Note 7 are about what you’d expect. With the 4GB RAM module coming from Samsung, as well as the 64GB Universal Flash Storage 2.0 module coming from Samsung. There are quite a few Qualcomm pieces inside, of course this is the Snapdragon 820 version of the Galaxy Note 7, so that is indeed expected. The audio codec, envelope tracker, RF Transceivers and a few others are all from Qualcomm. If you’d like to check out the full teardown by iFixit, head to the source link down below. They show you how to tear down the device, as well as how to fix different aspects of it. However, remember that since it is a glass back, that you’ll need to be careful that you don’t shatter that back when you remove it.