Mar 11

iFixit has an iPad 2, and they’re ripping it apart

Posted in: Apple, ipad, Ipad2, tablet, teardown, Today's Chili

It only took a few short hours for iFixit to get its hands on an iPad 2 (the WiFi variety), and of course, they immediately started to tear it apart. It’s a necessarily delicate task, but they’re making progress as we speak, and here are the first things that jump out to us: there is much less open space inside the iPad 2 than the original model, and the battery is very large. There aren’t any huge surprises in here internally yet, but it’s got the 1GHz A5 CPU, and 16GB of Toshiba TH58NVG7D2FLA89 NAND Flash. Like we said, they’re still at it with this one, and we’ll update as they do. Until then, hit up the source for all the photos.

iFixit has an iPad 2, and they’re ripping it apart originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mar 03

Gadget Lab Notes: The Guts of the Nintendo 3DS

Posted in: 3ds, earphones, Miscellaneous, nintendo, OLED, Today's Chili

The parts of the Nintendo 3DS layed out for all to see

Gadget Lab Notes is an eclectic roundup of gadget news briefs and intriguing products that catch our eye.

The Nintendo 3DS Gets Dissected By iFixit
The guys at iFixit announced that the 3DS is “the most camera-laden device we’ve ever taken apart,” with two cameras used for 3D recording and one for displaying 3D images. The motherboard features a Nintendo 1048 0H ARM CPU and a Fujitsu MB82M8080-07L, among other chips, and two LCD layers are used to create the parallax display that results in 3D footage when viewed from the right distance. The 3DS got a repairability score of 5/10, which means it’s not too impossibly difficult to tear apart.

Nintendo 3DS Teardown [iFixit via the Giz]

Thanko’s EARINALM Earphones Have a Built-In Alarm
If you’re taking a nap on the bus or the train, you may prefer falling asleep to your tunes rather than to the random bustle going on around you. But then how do you know when to wake up? Thanko’s EARINALM earphones solve that problem with a built-in alarm clock on the remote control. When the alarm sounds, its ringing will replace your music. It’s available for 2980 Yen, about $36.

EARINALM Earphones [Thanko via Akihabara News]

Japenese Human-Shaped Mobile Phone Is Designed to Relay Voice and “Human Presence”
Japanese researchers have created a mobile phone robot called Elfoid. Shaped like a palm-sized pseudo-human and covered in a “skin-like” outer layer, it’s designed to transmit both voice and “human presence,” which is done by mimicking the speakers head and upper body movements. They hope that by making the phone feel like the person you’re speaking with, you’ll feel closer to them (as opposed to being creeped out that you’re dialing your friends and loved ones on a voodoo doll-like skin phone that’s wiggling in your ear).

Mobile Phone With Human Touch and Elfoid, A Pocket-Sized Android

Zero Xu Is The First Street Motorcycle With a Swappable Battery Pack
Zero’s Xu electric motorcycle is the first model to get juice from a removable, exchangeable power pack. The integrated charger powers up the pack in 2 hours, but an optional standalone charger can quick-charge it in about half that time. The Xu, which starts at $7,995, is definitely designed more for short-distance commuting than cross country treks: it only has a 30-mile range.

Xu [Zero via Designboom]

OLED Display and Camera Are Combined in Bi-Directional OLED Prototype
The Fraunhofer Institute’s prototype bi-directional panel intersperses CMOS photoreceptors between AMOLED pixels so that the display can display and observe objects at the same time. Such technology could be used in wearable displays, or give your smartphone or tablet screen additional functionality as a scanner.

Bi-Directional OLED Microdisplay [OLED Info via Slashgear]


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Feb 25

Motorola Xoom and Thunderbolt-equipped MacBook Pro get torn down

Posted in: 10-inch, Apple, laptop, macbook, macbook pro, MacbookPro, moto, motorola, motorola xoom, MotorolaXoom, slate, tablet, teardown, thunderbolt, Today's Chili, xoom

The Xoom’s big attraction may be the ethereal Honeycomb that oozes within it, but it’s still a gadget made of metal, silicon and plastic, so we’re as keen as anyone to see what its insides look like. iFixit has dutifully performed the task of tearing one down to its constituent components and found an Atmel touchscreen controller capable of picking up 15 inputs at a time, a Qualcomm MDM6600 chip capable of 14.4Mbps HSPA+ speeds, some Toshiba NAND flash memory, and of course, NVIDIA’s beloved Tegra 2 dual-core SOC. The conclusion reached was that the Xoom is relatively easy to repair, though you should be aware there are no less than 57 screws holding the thing together, so free up a nice long afternoon if you intend to disassemble one yourself.

Aside from Moto’s flagship tablet, iFixit has also gotten to grips with Apple’s latest MacBook Pro, the one that can do Thunderbolt-fast transfers with as yet nonexistent peripherals, though discoveries there were predictably few and far between. The wireless card now has four antennas instead of three and there are some changes made to the cooling systems, but the real reason you’ll want to see this is the quad-core Sandy Bridge CPU lurking within — it’s as big and imposing as the performance it promises to deliver.

Motorola Xoom and Thunderbolt-equipped MacBook Pro get torn down originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 12:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Feb 25

Teardown: What’s Inside The Motorola Xoom

Posted in: motorola, Tablets and E-Readers, teardown, Today's Chili, xoom

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From the outside, tablets are almost all the same, especially when seen from the front. But like a pretty actor in a reality TV show, once you get under their skin you find out what really makes them tick. So it is with the Motorola Xoom, which has been opened up and photographed by — you guessed it — iFixit.

First off, it’s surprisingly easy to get in, requiring nothing but a Torx screwdriver to get the bulk of the cover off. This makes sense, as Motorola is going to be taking a lot of these apart to swap in 4G chipsets in the summer.

In fact, a lot of the design seems influenced by this crazy plan. To perform the swap, all a technician needs to do is remove those Torx screws, slide the rear cover open, remove a dummy chip-board and swap in the new one, reconnecting the antennas. It sounds a lot like swapping out Wi-Fi cards in a netbook, only with less screws. Here’s what iFixit has to say:

A seasoned technician can perform this swap in less than 10 minutes. Heck, a donkey could probably pull it off in less than two hours. We have no idea why a customer couldn’t just go to a Verizon store and have on-site representatives enable 4G on the spot, just like they’re able to transfer mobile contacts and perform other activation procedures.

Once inside, the first thing that you see is the huge battery, which is just as it should be: A tablet that doesn’t last all day is a tablet that isn’t worth buying. Then it’s onto the cameras (connected by separate cables for easy replacement), the speakers and then the main circuit board. As you already know, this contains the Nvidia Tegra T2 dual-core ARM A9 CPU and GeForce GPU. There’s not a lot of magic inside of any of these tablets — the trick is just to keep enough space spare to fit in a big battery.

IFixit rates the Xoom pretty high for fixability, and everything can be gotten out with “a spudger and a couple of Torx screwdrivers.” You’ll need some patience to tear everything down to the bare metal, though, because “there’s just a lot of labor involved with removing that many screws.”

Motorola Xoom Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Miroslav!]

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Feb 25

New MacBooks Torn Open, Thunderbolt Chip Revealed

Posted in: Apple, macbook, Notebooks, thunderbolt, Today's Chili

Inside the new 15 inch MacBook Pro, complete with Thunderbolt controller

The little pinky nail sized chip you see up there, inside the green square, is almost certainly the controller chip for the new MacBook Pro’s Thunderbolt port. The chip, and its tasty thermal paste topping, were found inside the new MacBooks by the teardown experts at iFixit.

The Thunderbolt (nee Light Peak) controller IC is what enables it to work its multi-protocol, daisy-chaining magic. Without that chip to process the serial data gushing through the copper, Thunderbolt would be little more than a dumb wire.

Other than Thunderbolt and upgrades to the CPU and graphics hardware, the new MacBooks are almost unchanged from the previous incarnation. The battery is the same 77.5 watt-hour model as before, and the case is virtually identical. Changes have been made to the wireless card now has four antennas instead of three, and the RAM is now the same as that used in last year’s 21.5 and 27 inch iMacs. There is also lots of thermal paste smeared around in there, which suggests that things are running hotter than before.

As ever, head to iFixit to see the guts if the new MBP in explicit, closeup detail, and marvel at just how few parts go into this thing.

MacBook Pro 15″ Unibody Early 2011 Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Miroslav!]

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Feb 24

iFixit tears down Galaxy S 4G, lights a fire for science

Posted in: samsung, t-mobile, teardown, Today's Chili
iFixit’s teardown of the Samsung Galaxy S 4G doesn’t exactly contain a ton of surprises — until the very end, that is. Apparently, there’s been some talk that Samsung used magnesium instead of aluminum for some of the components, and the best way iFixit could find to test that was to file some dust off the frame and set it ablaze (magnesium’s reaction is noticeably different than aluminum). Spoiler alert: it’s magnesium. Hit up the link below for the full blow-by-blow account.

iFixit tears down Galaxy S 4G, lights a fire for science originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 12:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Feb 22

Motorola Atrix 4G gets the teardown treatment, fourth G nowhere to be found

Posted in: 4G, Android, smartphone, teardown, Today's Chili

If our review of the Atrix left you hungering for more, you can now feast your eyes on the guts of Motorola’s new Android powerhouse. Thanks to the folks at iFixit, its teardown reveals a familiar range of parts — 16GB of NAND flash, 960×540 PenTile LCD, 1GB DDR2 RAM and that beast of a NVIDIA Tegra 2 CPU. What’s more, is that the teardown brings to light some enticing news — the glass panel is not glued to the LCD. This allows for the clumsy to not have to spend the extra dough if they crack the glass (which is usually affixed to the display). Hit the source link if you’ve got your Atrix and are ready to dismantle the thing yourself.

P.S. — There is a Qualcomm MDM6200 HSPA+ chip inside the phone. The title is meant to be a joke in reference to misconceptions about 4G wireless technology. You can read about them here.

Motorola Atrix 4G gets the teardown treatment, fourth G nowhere to be found originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 22:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Feb 07

Verizon iPhone’s Chipset Hints at Unified Network Support

Posted in: iPhone, Phones, Today's Chili, verizon

Hardware geeks have carefully dissected the Verizon iPhone to dig up its secrets.

Repair company iFixit pried open the iPhone and found that it uses the same Qualcomm chipset as the Droid Pro “World Phone.” That means this chipset is capable of supporting both GSM and CDMA, which means Apple might unify Verizon and AT&T iPhones in the future.

If Apple made just one iPhone to work on both network types in the future, it would solve a major problem facing the current Verizon iPhone. The current CDMA-only Verizon iPhone can only be used in the United States, as international networks are on GSM. An iPhone compatible with both AT&T and Verizon would turn future Verizon iPhones into world-compatible phones as well.

Why doesn’t the Verizon iPhone support GSM to solve that problem right now? iFixit thinks it’s to keep the antenna design simple for CDMA.

“It may be that it was easier to design antennas for a CDMA-only phone—this phone supports two cellular frequency bands, while Apple supports five bands in the GSM version,” iFixit said. “But this is a sign that Apple may be considering unifying the CDMA and GSM iPhones in the future.”

iFixit also observed that the Verizon iPhone has a redesigned vibrator to make vibrations quieter and a little softer. Check out iFixit for the full teardown details.

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Photo courtesy of iFixit


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Jan 20

How Apple Is Screwing Your iPhone

Posted in: Apple, iPhone, Phones, Today's Chili


Apple doesn’t want to let you inside your iPhone, even if all you want to do is fix it.

That’s what repair company iFixit claims, at least. The company recently discovered that Apple has quietly switched the screws in the latest shipments of the iPhone 4 from a basic Phillips head to a tamper-resistant screw that you can’t remove with any screwdriver you’d buy at a hardware store.

The screw in question is called a “Pentalobe” (see right), a five-point head with a round shape resembling a daisy.

“They chose this ‘Pentalobe’ fastener specifically because it was new, guaranteeing repair tools would be both rare and expensive,” said Kyle Wiens, iFixit’s CEO. “The iPhone 4 originally shipped with Phillips screws, but Apple has transitioned completely to this new security screw. Shame on them.”

It’s not unusual for manufacturers to use obscure screws and strict software security on their products to prevent people from tampering with their devices.

Sometimes tamper-resistance is designed for protecting company profits. In the case of software, Sony, for example, baked extra-strict security into the PlayStation 3’s operating system, which hackers recently infiltrated to install pirated software on the console. In a lawsuit, Sony asked a court to remove all traces of the PS3 hack from the internet, claiming it violated copyright law and would eat into PS3 game sales.

And when it comes to odd screws keeping you out of hardware, it’s most likely to get you to buy new stuff sooner. On Apple products, obscure screws began showing up on the mid-2009 MacBook Pro to prevent you from removing and replacing the battery, according to iFixit, and it’s been a recurring trend ever since. In this context, Apple would rather you buy a brand-new MacBook Pro when its battery dies than simply purchase a new battery, Wiens suggests.

Wiens added that if you own an iPhone 4 that came with Phillips screws and you take it to an Apple store for repair, Apple employees will replace the screws with the Pentalobular screws to prevent you from getting inside.

“This move is a part of Apple’s strategic plan to increase the rate of obsolescence of their hardware,” Wiens said.

If your iPhone is tainted with those funky  screws, you’re in luck: iFixit is selling the Pentalobular screwdriver for $10.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Photo of an iPhone 4 with Phillips head screws: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Illustration courtesy of iFixit

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Jan 14

CES Confessions: Booth Babes, Trash, Motorola, Media

Posted in: Miscellaneous, motorola, Today's Chili, video

CES isn’t all about the gadgets and the deals. Sometimes, it’s about the booth babes — and the recycling.

At the show last week, Wired.com’s video team interviewed four people for their unusual perspectives on the enormous electronics tradeshow, which brought an estimated 140,000 people to Las Vegas for a weeklong download of gadget news and wheeling and dealing.

Above, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens points out just how wasteful a tradeshow like CES is. Not once, he says, did he see a recycling bin, and trade-show goons even made him give up the water bottle he was trying to keep for reuse.

Besides conspicuous consumption and waste, another aspect of CES is the booth babes: Attractive, scantily clad women hired to hawk a company’s wares. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal looked into the business and found that, yes, there are companies you can call if you want, say, to hire a dozen Penthouse models who can talk about gadgets.

We interviewed Wired magazine publisher Howard Mittman on the rising importance of CES to the media industry. With the proliferation of tech-based media distribution platforms like the internet and the iPad, CES is turning into a must-attend show for people in publishing now too. And business is pretty good, according to Mittman.

Finally, one of the biggest stories of the show was the comeback of Motorola, a company that many left for dead a couple years ago. Wired’s Fred Vogelstein, who was at CES working on a magazine story, talks about the Android-powered return of Moto.

Videos: Annaliza Savage (producer), John Ross (camera), Michael Lennon and Fernando Cardoso (editing)


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