Remember last year when there was a big brouhaha about how you could insert the Samsung Galaxy Note 5’s S Pen backwards and potentially damage your phone? Samsung started putting stickers on new Note 5 units to ensure that owners knew how to correctly insert the S Pen, but it appears that the company has gone a step further to take care of the issue.
A source speaking to Phandroid says that Samsung has addressed the Note 5 backward S Pen issue by adding a small tab on the device’s circuit board. The tab prevents the backward S Pen from damaging the circuit board when the pen is pulled out backwards. You can see the difference between the new and old boards below, with the new circuit board on the left and its new tab in the upper right part of the board.
Samsung hasn’t yet confirmed this change, but it’s said to be included in new models. The bad news is that it’s currently unclear how you can tell the new models from the old ones, so folks buying a new Note 5 will just have to take a gamble and hope that they get a new version.
It’s kind of a bummer that this new tab is just now making it into new Note 5 models, several months after the device originally launched. The good news is that if you’ve already got a Note 5, you can avoid the backwards S Pen issue by being careful about how you insert your S Pen every time that you’re done with it.