Hasta La Gadget!

What’s lovely about this alphabet made from camera parts by London graphic design student Stefan Abrahams is that it organizes a camera’s beautiful internals as carefully as one should frame a picture. Each letter has a camera part, you can see the viewfinder as ‘D’ and the shutter curtain as ‘R’. More »

Microsoft only launched the Surface Pro tablet a few days ago. It didn’t take long for the guys over at iFixit to get their hands on one of the tablets and proceed to take it apart. iFixit does this to show how repairable the tablet is if you should happen to damage it, or want to expand or modify it – and because they’re just as curious as you are about what it looks like inside.

I think we all know it’s just cool to see the parts that are on the inside of some the most desirable gadgets on the market. Unfortunately, cracking the Surface open required the removal of a veritable crapton of screws (90 to be exact) and a heat gun to melt the copious amounts of adhesive used to hold the tablet together. In fact, it took them over an hour to figure out how to get the screen out of the tablet. iFixit said, “We are starting to miss the old Surface, as we find a metric duckload of adhesive holding the screen in place.” The battery is also glued into place, behind the motherboard.

Removing the screen appears to have been the most difficult part of the delicate operation. After the screen was removed, all of the hardware on the inside can be seen, which is surprisingly minimal. Highlights include a Intel Core i5-3317U Processor, the Intel Mobile HM77 Express Chipset, 3x Atmel MXT154E Touchscreen Controllers, 4GB of Micron RAM, a teeny tiny 1.8″ Micron RealSSD unit, and a Wacom W9002 chip for pen-based input. It also features two of the tiniest cooling fans you’ll ever see:

Overall, the Surface Pro tablet scored a miserable repairability rating of just 1 out of 10. That means if you break it, you probably just need to buy a new one. You can check out the detailed teardown over on iFixit.

The gadget destroying geeks over at iFixit have laid their hands on the new Microsoft Surface Pro tablet and ripped it apart. Those of you wanting to see what the gooey insides of Microsoft’s new tablet look like, can check it out. There are surprisingly few parts inside of the tablet.

The idea behind this sort of gadget teardown is to see exactly how repairable the tablet would be if you had to fix something yourself. Unfortunately, for people who are buying the Surface Pro the answer to that repairability question is not very. Apparently, over 90 different screws hold the tablet together.

While that is certainly a lot of screws, those can be removed with the proper tools and time. What’s even more difficult to contend with is the copious amount of adhesive that holds various components together. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the gadget destroying crew says people who open the case are highly likely to damage a cable in the process due to the way the tablet is constructed.

What this all means is that the Surface Pro ends up with a repairability rating of only one out of 10. In other words, this tablet is pretty much not repairable. The moral of the story is be very careful with your Surface Pro because if you break it odds are you won’t be getting it fixed.

[via Engadget]

iFixit guts the Microsoft Surface Pro is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

You know the drill (or is that screwdriver?) by now. New gadget lands at the iFixit labs, and the good folk there give it a teardown. Microsoft’s Surface Pro is this week’s lucky slab of silicon to hit the bench. The good news is that a removable battery and SSD will make swapping those out a charm. That’s pretty much it for the good news though. The less good news is the sheer number of screws you’re going to have to contend with (over 90 by iFixit’s count). The bad news is that screen is a real fiddle to remove, and there are globs of adhesive to navigate (holding that battery and screen in place for example). The worst part? By our tool-weilding friend’s reckoning, you’ll be lucky not to sever a major cable artery just by opening the thing. There’s not much by way of hardware surprises, bar the mAh rating of the battery (5,676). All this earns the Surface Pro a repairability rating of just one out ten (ten being the best). Better treat yours with the love and care it deserves then.

[Thanks, Chris]

Filed under: Tablets, Microsoft

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Via: TabTech

Source: iFixit

What’s in a phone? If it’s the BlackBerry Z10, then it’s plenty of Qualcomm gadgets and a surprising mixture of components already seen used in Samsung’s Galaxy S III, with a new teardown of the BlackBerry 10 smartphone suggesting the Canadian firm may well have cribbed some design inspiration from South Korea. UBM TechInsights whipped off the Z10′s covers and dug around the parts bin raiding inside, with Qualcomm apparently ousting one-time BlackBerry best-buddy Texas Instruments for the most part.

Where TI was previously a mainstay for processors and chips in BlackBerry phones, the Z10 instead looks to Qualcomm for its 1.5GHz dualcore processor, 3G/LTE modem, GPU, power management chip, GPS, and more. TI is relegated to providing the WiFi/Bluetooth/FM combo chip, while Samsung donates the flash memory and RAM.

Perhaps more interesting than the origin of the components is the decision process BlackBerry (nee RIM) seemingly made in how they were combined, something which is supposedly strongly reminiscent of Samsung’s assembly strategy with the Galaxy series. Various parts – from the processor that’s also in the LTE Galaxy S III, to the new WCD9310 audio codec in the same phone – seem to indicate that BlackBerry certainly knows who its key rivals are.

“It’s not certain if these decisions the designers made on what semiconductors, ICs and other modules to use were by design or by accident” UBM concludes, “but based on the relative success of the Samsung Galaxy S3, it isn’t a bad model to draw from.”

If you’re more interested in how the BlackBerry Z10 – and BlackBerry 10 as a platform – performs when the phone is in one piece, check out our full review.

[via Gizmodo]

BlackBerry Z10 teardown tips Samsung inspiration is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.