I received the replacement glass from China today so I tried to replace it. The tablet opens up by removing the back plate (the one imitating leather). Inside it looks very similar to the original Note 10.1. Very modular and easy to tear down... until you get to the display.
You can remove the USB3 port with the card readers, front camera with light sensor, rear camera with microphone, both speakers, the antennas, the vibrator with audio jack and the LCD cable. Then you can disconnect the touch sensor cable, the Wacom cable, the standby/volume buttons and then the motherboard goes free.
But after that you have the middle metal frame and the bezel with the LCD/Wacom digitizer inside and the glass/touch sensor over it and the home button. But the similarities with the Note 10.1 end here. In the old tablet you can remove the metal frame by cutting all the heat stacked plastic fasteners, then the frame comes out and then the LCD so you end with the plastic bezel glued to the glass/touch sensor. If your glass is broken, you just rip it off and glue the new one.
But in the Note Pro, removing the heat stacked plastic fasteners doesn't liberate the frame. It is also glued with adhesive to the back of the LCD and to the plastic frame but the worst of all is there seems to be a point between the MicroSD and SIM readers where the frame is strongly bonded to the bezel with a metal piece impossible to separate so the LCD is trapped inside.
What's worse, the Glass is glued to the LCD in ALL THE SURFACE just like the Galaxy phones, so any attempt to remove the glass without breaking the LCD below is an almost impossible task. I tried it and I failed. When I noticed the complexity of the task I put everything back together and turned the tablet on. The LCD was dead. The tablet is still working but no image. I can hear the sounds and it is very unlikely the other easily removable components got damaged.
So at the end, if you break the glass, you have to replace all the front of the tablet, including LCD, Glass, Touch Sensor, Wacom sensor, Home button, plastic bezel and metal frame. A pretty expensive replacement piece, I think.
Well, at least the pictures I took during the proccess will serve for a teardown tutorial in Ifixit and to help other to know what can be done and what not.
NOTE: Although it is very difficult to replace the glass of a Galaxy phone, there are workshops that know how to do it. Basically you have to go very slow and apply the exact amount of heat to loosen the glue. I think it could be possible to apply the same technique to the Note Pro to replace the broken glass but it is too late for me. I suppose I will sell the tablet for parts or not working because if finding a glass was difficult, I don't want to imagine how difficult (and expensive) will be to find the whole display
