At Mobile World Congress 2018, Samsung introduced the world to the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus, its latest flagship smartphones. While the smartphone has shows a lot of promise, we’ve been wondering about what the phones bring under the hood. A recent teardown from iFixit has revealed several details, like the fact that Samsung’s AR Emoji feature is purely software-based.
We now see some other details about the Galaxy S9 internals. Teardown revealed that Samsung’s latest flagship phones come with a new RF transceiver and redesigns it’s power management integrated circuit. The RF module included in the Galaxy S9 Plus is the Shannon 965, which is Samsung’s in-house chip that’s compatible with the LTE Cat.18 modem part of Exynox 9810 silicon powering the global variants of the company’s smartphones. In addition, the Shannon 560 is the company’s new PMIC that succeeds the Shannon 555 found inside last year’s Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus.
The Exynos 9810 model of the Galaxy S9 Plus feature a new envelope tracker called the Shannon 735. This continuously adjusts the RF power amplifier’s power supply voltage, and helps to optimize the energy efficiency of every individual transmission.
Many of the other components found in this year’s Samsung smartphones are almost identical, with Samsung again opting to use a Broadcom-made GNSS receiver and one of its own NFC modules. The Galaxy S9 Plus ships with a 3,500mAh cell whose capacity is identical to last year’s Galaxy S8 Plus, and the same for Galaxy S9’s 3,000mAh battery.
