Hasta La Gadget!

It’s teardown time again, and this time the poor gadget under iFixit’s menacing spudger is the Samsung Series 5 3G Chromebook, one of Google’s follow-ups to the rather poorly-received Cr-48 Chromebook.

Before we get inside, it’s worth mentioning that Samsung has fixed the two big problems with the original. The trackpad now works properly (can it really have been so hard to get right? It’s not like trackpads are new tech) and the battery life is now a good long 8 hours. It is also a little faster thanks to its Atom N570 processor, and — according to iFixit CEO Kyle “The Can-Opener” Wiens — looks a lot better. I’m a sucker for clunky, utilitarian design, so I actually prefer the old one.

Then we dive inside the device. It’s possible to disassemble the whole thing with the spudger, a plastic opening tool, and a Phillips number 1 screwdriver.

The Series 5 is put together a lot like a vanilla netbook, with standard slot-in parts for things like Wi-Fi and 3G WWAN. The 16GB SanDisk SSD is also a standard plug-in module, so it should be possible to upgrade if you want to. In the pictures above, you can see the insides of both the new Chromebook and the original Cr48 for comparison.

Ifixit gives the Series 5 3G Chromebook a Repairability Score of 6 out of 10. Not bad. Be sure to check out the full teardown, complete with “huge” photographs of each step.

Samsung Series 5 3G Chromebook Teardown [iFixit. thanks, Kyle!]

See Also:

• Google Debuts Chromebook, the Web-Only Laptop
• Hands-On With Google's New Chromebook
• Google's Cr-48 Netbook Looks Gorgeous, Ditches Caps-Lock
• Cr-48

IFixit’s clear case shows off your iPhone’s internal organs

For $30 iFixit will sell you an x-ray vision-like glimpse into the guts of your iPhone 4. The plastic panel is a direct replacement for the shatter-happy glass panel that ships with the iPhone, and contains all the necessary extras: camera lens, flash diffuser and black bezel.

Gaze through the transparent window and you’ll see the big battery, the camera and flash and a sweet warning sticker that reads “Authorized Service Provider Only.” Whatevs, Apple. We don’t care about your warranties.

Frivolous? Sure, but with one rather practical advantage. The iFixit panel costs less than half the $80 you’ll need for the fragile, boring, non-see-through OEM panel.

iPhone 4 Transparent Rear Panel [iFixit]

See Also:

• Sleek Metal Cover Replaces Glass iPhone 4 Backplate
• Sugru Keeps Your iPhone Safe From a Fatal Fall
• Cases Might Break iPhone 4 Glass Due to Design Flaw

Remember when computers had removable batteries? Neither do I, but apparently they did. These days, the batteries come hidden away from the user, freed from their bulky cases so that device makers can squeeze more into smaller and smaller spaces. So it is with the BlackBerry PlayBook, freshly torn open by the ravenous zombies at iFixit. “Chipzzzz”, they cry as they rip into brand new electronics with their spudgers. “Chipzzz!”

But this hard-to-access battery (hidden behind the motherboard and speaker), along with a metal frame glued to the screen, is the only hard-to-repair part of RIM’s new miniature tablet. Everything else can be disassembled with standard tools, leading iFixit to give it a 7 out of 10 repairability rating.

So just what is inside? Well, the battery, of course, which is a 20 watt-hour model, compared to the 25 watt-hour battery in the iPad, and the 24 watt-hour in the Xoom. Then there are the camera, accelerometers, motherboard and so on, and these are all incredibly neatly lined up. It’s so tidy in there that the layout could have been designed by Rain Main.

Those speakers are promising, too. First, there are two of them. Second, each one is actually made up of two units. When I tried out the PlayBook at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, I couldn’t hear anything thanks to the trade-show acoustics, but stereo is certainly a step up from the iPad, and especially the iPad 2 which has a crappier sounding speaker than the original.

Otherwise, the PlayBook is much like any other tablet: A screen and a small board of chips, with the rest of the case filled up with batteries. To see the full (and neat and easy to repair) details, head over to iFixit.

BlackBerry PlayBook Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Miroslav]

See Also:

• BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet Lacks All the Right Moves
• PlayBook Tablet Has a Spotty Day One in San Francisco
• Could Flash Be Holding Back BlackBerry PlayBook?
• Teardown: What’s Inside The Motorola Xoom
• IFixit
• The Inevitable iFixit iPad 2 Teardown
• IFixit Smart Cover Teardown: Contains Magnets. Lots of Magnets …

By now you’ve probably watched iFixit’s recent iPad 2 teardown video several times while drooling profusely, but we just know you’re itching to find out what’s different with the innards of the WiFi-only, GSM, and CDMA versions. Well once again, iFixit’s got you covered — via an “exceptionally cool” user-contributed post, this time. A grand total of three iPad 2s were sacrificed in this round, revealing variations in case design, antenna count, WWAN board layout, radio chipset choices, and headphone jack assemblies. Besides clearly visible changes like the black antenna window on the 3G models and the microSIM slot on the GSM version, it’s interesting to note that Apple made the same design choices with the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4. The CDMA model features an additional antenna over its GSM sibling, and uses a Qualcomm Gobi dual-mode radio which supports both CDMA and GSM — the latter being unused — along with an integrated GPS receiver, just like the iPhone 4 for Verizon. The GSM version, meanwhile, uses an Infineon chipset for GSM and a separate Broadcom module for GPS, just like the global iPhone 4. Follow the source link below for more sordid details plus high-resolution pictures.

iPad 2 sliced up again, this time in the name of radio science originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Mar 2011 03:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  iFixit  | Email this | Comments

If iFixit had been around when God created the Earth, then Kyle Wiens and crew would have been up before the first dawn — Torx drivers at the ready — and grabbed the first sunrise as it came over the lip of the virgin Earth. Then they would have opened it up, photographed its nuclear inner-workings, and then waited six billion years or so for someone to invent an internet to post the pictures on.

So it is of course the natural order of things that iFixit should open up the iPad 2 to find out what is inside. Short answer: not much. Long answer: almost nothing but batteries.

Opening the new iPad is a lot trickier than the last one. Where the iPad 1 used Apple’s usual array of clips to hold on the screen assembly, the iPad 2 front-panel is glued on, requiring a heat-gun, some skill and a big pair of balls to remove safely.

Once inside, you see the batteries, which are thinner and wider than before. They hold almost the exact same charge, though: 25 Watt-hours vs. 24.8 Watt-hours of the original. Laid up beside the batteries is the tiny logic board, with Apple’s A5 chip, the touchscreen controller, the Wi-Fi chip (iFixit tore open the Wi-Fi-only model), memory and everything else. The interior of the iPad really is almost nothing but battery.

Arrayed around the edges, and squirreled away into the nooks and crannies of the stiff unibody case are the various camera assemblies, the gyroscope and accelerometer and the volume, mute and power switches. And that’s about it. Sadly, the one thing I really wanted to see isn’t shown, that’s the magnets which are used to hold on the Smart Cover. Perhaps we’ll see these in a repair guide in the future. I’d also like to see the inner-workings of the Smart Cover itself.

Internally as well as externally, then, the iPad 2 is but a small evolution from its predecessor. An that’s no bad thing. As some wags on the Twitter have noted, Apple will likely make more money selling Smart Covers than its rivals will make selling tablets.

iPad 2 Wi-Fi Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Miroslav!]