Galaxy S6 teardown reveals a battery that's almost impossible to replace

The Samsung Galaxy S6 is a cutting edge piece of mobile technology, so who can resist wanting to take a peek inside at the hardware and at how it’s all put together? MyFixGuide has taken the flagship apart, revealing a wonderfully put together smartphone, but this design comes at the expense of easy repairs.

Immediately, the new metal and glass build is a little trickier to work with than the old plastic back covers, especially if you want to avoid damage upon opening. It took 2-3 minutes of warming up the smartphone with a heat gun before the back panel could be removed. There’s then a middle frame, held in by screws, with the NFC circuitry placed on top.

Inside, the nifty Exynos 7420 SoC is neatly arranged on a slim form motherboard, accompanied by the RAM and flash memory, and SIM slots. The flip-side of the same board houses the NFC, heart rate sensor and infra-red sensors chips. The headphone jack, speaker and cameras are all connected via by familiar leads. The battery takes up the bulk of the interior space and it doesn’t look like Samsung could have squeeze much more than a 2,550mAh component into this form factor.

Interestingly, some had claimed that the Galaxy S6 still features a removable battery, despite Samsung glancing over the point during its announcement. While not technically wrong, the battery is secured in such a way that makes it virtually inaccessible to the vast majority of users. Even after removing the cover, the middle frame, NFC wiring and motherboard must also all be unscrewed before gaining access to the battery connection. This certainly isn’t as user friendly as simply taking off the cover and swapping batteries in and out.

The Samsung Galaxy S6 is clearly very well put together, but the transition to new build materials has necessitated a compromise on some of the old feature favourites, namely the lack of a microSD card slot and a battery that, for all intents and purposes, is locked in place.