14 DAY TRIAL // You’ve probably caught up by now with the whole fuss gravitating around the Samsung Galaxy Note5 and its S Pen. As it turns out, it’s extremely easy for users to insert the S Pen in its slot backwards without encountering any resistance from the device.
As harmless as this action seems, it might lead to breaking the S Pen recognition mechanism, meaning that the stylus would be rendered useless. The phone itself would remain functional, but what’s the point of owning a Note device if you can’t use the S Pen?
Samsung has already acknowledged the problem, but sadly a fix hasn’t been provided. Instead, the Korean tech giant instructed users to pick up the manual and read the S Pen section before they go ahead and use the Note5. But the question remains: how could this issue have escaped Samsung’s rigorous device testing?
The company’s excuse that it didn’t think that backwards insertion could actually amount to a problem doesn’t really sound right. So, why is it so easy for someone to insert the S Pen backwards?
The S Pen mystery gets resolved
The folks at 9to5Google in collaboration with uBreakFix have sacrificed their Galaxy Note5 in the name of science, in order to find out what really goes on under the hood of the device.
As it becomes visible in the teardown photographs (included in the gallery below), when inserted backwards, the S Pen gets stuck in the slot due to the grooves located on the side of it. The thing is, they should be sliding into levers inside the slot and make that clicking sound once everything is in place. However, due to the design of the S Pen, once the stylus gets caught on the lever, there’s no turning back.
If you try to pull the S Pen out and get past the lever, it turns out there’s another one that touches the stylus so very slightly but can still be broken very easily. Pulling the pen really hard might result in the lever being broken off the mainboard of the phone, which will annul the S Pen detection function.
With the mystery having been solved, we suggest you take extra care when handling the S Pen with your Galaxy Note5, especially now that you’ve witnessed first-hand the damage that can be caused.
