...But for all our talk, this rear panel does present something new. The fingerprint reader lives in the rear panel, with a very short cable tying it to the motherboard.

It looks like Samsung designed this cable to safely pull free with the rear panel. With almost no slack in the cable, the gentlest lift of the panel yanks the cable right out from its tiny pop connector. This makes it decidedly less damage-prone than certain fingerprint sensor cables we've seen before.

Cable dispatched, and we've got the glass out of the way. The S8+ and S8 follow the S6's move to a glass rear panel. This design has saved Samsung the engineering effort that goes into integrating antennas into a metal-backed phone, at the cost of durability and repairability.

Twice the crackability and a heck of an opening procedure won't help when it's time to score the repairability.