this year with a motorized camera that both extends up and rotates around to face the

front. Pretty interesting. Today we're going to take the whole thing apart and see how

it all works from the inside.

Let's get started.

[Intro]

If you remember, during my durability test, which this phone obviously survived, the rear

panel next to the camera seam started to lift off the phone a little bit. So that's where

we're going to start today. Lifting up with my large suction cup and slicing through the

very strong adhesive under the glass. One down side of having a motor inside the phone

with a large opening for the camera protrusion is that the phone is not water resistant.

But Samsung went ahead and still made this rear adhesive super strong anyway. Finally,

with enough persuasion, the glass can lift off exposing some pretty cool looking internals.

That copper colored NFC pad looks pretty awesome. Thumbs up for that. If the phone still works

when I put it all back together, maybe we'll make a clear version.

I'll turn the phone on real quick so we can see the internal hardware in action. When

I press the camera button on the screen, we can watch the camera rise up and out of the

phone with the longest stepper motor shaft we've ever seen. The black and pink plastics

still hide most of the hardware, but we're getting there. The rear black plastics are

held down by 12 normal Philips head screws. They're actually quite a lot of screws in

here so I'm going to keep everything organized on my desk. Once the screws are out the back

plastics can come off of the phone. The NFC pad has the same copper coloring that we saw

on the back of the Pixel 4XL. This time though it's attached to the plastics and not the

rear glass. Normally I would unplug the battery at this point, but this autopsy's going to

be live. We want the phone to keep motoring up and down a few more times while we figure

out how it works.

The bottom lower loud speaker comes out next. There are no foam balls inside of this guy,

in fact it looks like the rear speaker is just set inside of the plastic housing and

not built out of the plastic housing. A reminder that this phone only costs $500 on Amazon

right now so there probably were a few corners cut to save pennies here and there...especially

when so much work when into motorizing the camera. After heating up the plastic area

underneath the triple camera setup, I was able to peel it away revealing more pink anodized

aluminum Same as up here underneath the top plastics

section around the camera - more pink anodized metal.

Now we can see a bit more of what's going on. The whole motor is visible at this point

and we can see all of the magic happening inside the A80 is happening with just one

motor, raising and flipping. We'll have to go deeper to understand it. I'll remove the

plastic screw protectors and unscrew the 2 screws at the top of the motor shaft that

hold the motor to the top portion of the phone. Along with 4 more screws that hold the top

of the phone to the side guardrails. There is a metal plate at the base of these side

rails that catch on little lips to stop the upward motion and start the camera flipping

motion. We'll see more in just a second. The camera still can't be removed to the phone

though since it's attached to the underside of the motherboard.

I'll remove the 5 Phillips head screws holding the motherboard to the frame and then unplug

the little stepper motor connector, along with the massive mammoth cable going down

to the charging port - just like big little Lego. Once everything is unplugged, the whole

motherboard and camera unit can slide up and out of the guiding rails and away from the

phone. I don't think we've ever had a phone that disassembles in massive chunks like this

before. It looks pretty cool inside. We can get an up-close look at the stepper motor

now. It has one threaded shaft that can raise and lower the metal part that grips the top.

It also has a smooth guiding shaft on the right that keeps the piece level while it's

motoring up and down. These large metal rails in the side are probably what help keep both

halves in place while I was attempting my bend test. There's also a coin-style vibrator

motor and a small pad of thermal foam underneath the motherboard.

Before we start taking apart the flippy part of the camera, let's remove the charging port.

It has 3 ribbon cables and one screw, and then the whole thing can pull away. Oh. One

second....and then the whole thing can pull away from the phone. This little guy has a

USB-C charger that can fast charge at 18 watts. Along with a built-in SIM card tray. Down

here underneath the charging port are 2 more screws that hold in the underscreen fingerprint

scanner. This is an optical little guy. You can see the little camera lens that takes

a picture of your finger through the pixels on the OLED screen. Now normally I do like

to remove the back from smartphones, but Samsung has once again made this impossible. Removing

the battery is a death sentence to the phone since any bend while prying it out will cause

the internal layers of the battery to touch, which makes the battery either short out immediately

or slowly expand and die over the next few months. So it's super unfortunate that Samsung

isn't allowing these batteries to be removed, especially since this number right here is

the environment-friendly use period meaning 5 is the number of years you have before the

chemicals in the battery might start leaking out. That'll be exciting for your pocket.

Samsung should allow their permanent batteries to be more easily removable.

I'll unplug each of the camera ribbon cables on the back of the motherboard, then I'll

heat up and peel back the last plastic pink layer around the front side of the camera.

This exposes eight more Phillips head screws. Once those are off I can remove the two black

plastic protective pieces. Then we get our first real good look at the camera hardware.

As this top portion of the phone gets motored up, we can see the camera starts flipping

around like some kind of rotisserie chicken. This rotation only happens at the peak of

extension. You can see the camera ribbon cables are actually rotating around the spindles

as well with the camera, getting tighter when the camera is facing the front of the phone

and loosening up when the camera is in it's normal rear-facing position. All of this action

is so that the higher-quality camera can be used on both the front and back of the phone.

I'll unclip each of the spindly camera connectors, remove 4 more screws, and I can pull the camera

skeleton away from the metal body. This gives us a better view of the gears that take the

upward force at the peak of the stepper motor lift and transition it into the rotisserie

chicken force for the pop-up camera, which gets that flippy motion. Pretty ingenious.

Definitely more complicated than the dual screen phone we took apart a while ago, but

it's still very interesting to see the camera in motion.

I hope you haven't gotten bored of seeing screws yet. We have 4 more left. Samsung switched

things up a bit with a tri-tip screw instead of a Phillips head. My tool kit does come

with all kinds of bits though. I'll link that down in the video description. Once the screws

are taken apart on both sides, the pink chicken can come apart, showing us the three different

cameras inside of the Galaxy A80. The 8 megapixel ultra wide camera on the left, 48 megapixel

main camera in the center, and a 3D depth camera on the right side next to the LED flash

– none of which have optical image stabilization. This $500 phone has enough futuristic over-engineering

inside that makes it look like it belongs in a Star Wars movie. It's pretty amazing

what can be done with the limited space inside of a cell phone body. It takes some super

smart people to think these things up.

Getting the phone back together is easy enough. Just kidding, there are like 40-something

screws inside of here so it's more like a nightmare. But at least we got to see all

the stuff we came here for. I'll make sure the long stepper motor is secured into the

camera unit, and everything along the side rails is attached and screwed in. Staying

organized is really the key to working with all these little screws and components. One

sneeze and it's all over.

I'll get the charging port secured into place with the loudspeaker on top. Once the battery

is connected I can turn the phone back on to see if the motor is set right and functional.

I still want to see what a clear version of the A80 would look like. And there we go.

It's definitely still working.

You already know how clear phones work from my other videos so I won't bore you with the

details. This A80 is more one of the laminate colored pieces of glass. The kind where the

color pulls away in large chunks. This might look easy on camera, but since laminate is

not designed to peel away from the glass, it is fairly difficult and requires quite

a bit of force. Remember that if you ever attempt this yourself, it is very difficult.

The laminate also holds the glass together if it ever cracks. So my clear phones are

weaker than the original. Of course if Samsung did this at the factory, they could just add

clear laminate and be just fine. Finally, after all the curlicues of color are removed

from the glass, I can set it down into place. And once again, I totally think Samsung should

be making clear versions of this phone. With all the moving parts and even a cool copper

NFC coil, I think the Galaxy A80 is currently front runner for having the best looking smartphone

guts of the year. Let me know what you think. Would you rather have an extravagant motorized

camera system in your phone, or would you prefer the dual screen method to get rid of

the notch like we saw on the Nubia Z20? Let me know down in the comments. Either way,

phones this year have been pretty awesome.

Hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. Got a lot of videos coming for the future.

And come hang out with me on Instagram and Twitter. Thanks a ton for watching, I'll see

you around.