Samsung suffered a terrible ordeal last year when the company’s flagship phablet Galaxy Note 7 was found to have a faulty battery. The battery not only overheated but had a propensity of exploding, causing serious injuries to people. Following this discovery, the South Korean company was forced to recall the handset globally and suffered major losses as a result.
However, to minimize some of the loss, Samsung recently decided to launch a refurbished version of the Galaxy Note 7, albeit boasting a smaller and safer battery.
Thus the Galaxy Note 7 Fan Edition was born which was said to have been produced by recycling some parts of the original phablet. However, the folks at iFixit performed a Teardown of the new handset to find out just what is new and what has been reused from the earlier handset.
iFixit teardown of the Samsung phablet
iFixit is known to perform teardown on almost all new handsets, which generally give people an idea of what the inside of their devices look like and how easy or difficult it would be to repair, in case it gets damaged in the future. However, the teardown of the Samsung phone is immensely important in order to find out what exactly has changed from the recalled version from last year.
According to the team, not much has changed since the last time, at least not physically. The Galaxy Note 7 features the same setup under its hood as its ill-fated predecessor. However, the battery has undergone some major change, as is to be expected. The iFixit teardown reveals that Samsung has opted for a lower powered battery this time around, so that 2016’s debacle is not repeated again.
The teardown shows that the new battery in the device is actually brand new and has been manufactured in June. It also clocks in at just 12.32 Wh compared to the 13.48 Wh one in the original Galaxy Note 7. Its weight is also much significantly lesser than the earlier variant. iFixit reveals that the battery weighs 45.4 grams, which is 2.3 grams lesser than the one in the 2016 model.
The only other change in the new phone noticed by the teardown team was a different antenna pattern, which could just have been added to make the phone suitable for Korean carriers.
Specs of the refurbished phone
The refurbished handset comes with a 5.7-inch Super AMOLED Quad HD display powered by the octa core Exynos 8890 chipset. The phablet also boasts 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage, expandable up to 256 GB. A 12-megapixel Dual Pixel lens acts as the primary camera while, a 5-megapixel sensor is present in the front.