Motorola DROID 2 gets disassembled for your viewing pleasure
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We have gotten used to the iFixit treatment of every new and worthy gadget, and would honestly miss it if one day a great phone appears, and we never see what's inside. The hard working people there have disassembled a shiny new Motorola DROID 2, just to find out that the innards have mostly the same layout as on the original, save for the new elements like the 8GB NAND flash internal memory chip. Even the keyboard can supposedly be replaced with the old style, as the spacing and contacts on the back look identical.
An interesting take from the teardown is that the DROID 2 has the same 1390mAh battery that the first DROID had, however talk time in 3G mode is estimated to be nearly ten full hours instead of the 6.5 we had in the original. And that's with the Texas Instruments OMAP 3630 CPU clocked at 1GHz, instead of the 600 MHz of its predecessor. The combination of Froyo optimized for a TI OMAP chipset, produced with the 45nm technology, has brought to the DROID 2 a whopping 49% increase in battery life!
It certainly looks like those claims for 30% increases in battery life when moving from the 65nm to the 45nm process, and then another 30% when dual-core chipsets of this kind hit from TI, Qualcomm and Samsung, is not vapor ware. If such talk times can be achieved on an Android handset, then the smartphone industry is certainly heading in the right direction with the new 45nm chipsets, like the ones we find on the Motorola DROID 2 and Samsung Galaxy S phones.
There was a mention in the iFixit writeup of the antenna position, which is cleverly just a gold wrap around the speaker at the bottom. We think that antenna position design decisions should be a must in phone disassembling articles from now on in light of certain events. Also, it is amazing how small the camera module actually is.
Motorola DROID 2 Specifications | Review
source: iFixit
An interesting take from the teardown is that the DROID 2 has the same 1390mAh battery that the first DROID had, however talk time in 3G mode is estimated to be nearly ten full hours instead of the 6.5 we had in the original. And that's with the Texas Instruments OMAP 3630 CPU clocked at 1GHz, instead of the 600 MHz of its predecessor. The combination of Froyo optimized for a TI OMAP chipset, produced with the 45nm technology, has brought to the DROID 2 a whopping 49% increase in battery life!
It certainly looks like those claims for 30% increases in battery life when moving from the 65nm to the 45nm process, and then another 30% when dual-core chipsets of this kind hit from TI, Qualcomm and Samsung, is not vapor ware. If such talk times can be achieved on an Android handset, then the smartphone industry is certainly heading in the right direction with the new 45nm chipsets, like the ones we find on the Motorola DROID 2 and Samsung Galaxy S phones.
There was a mention in the iFixit writeup of the antenna position, which is cleverly just a gold wrap around the speaker at the bottom. We think that antenna position design decisions should be a must in phone disassembling articles from now on in light of certain events. Also, it is amazing how small the camera module actually is.
Motorola DROID 2 Specifications | Review
source: iFixit
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Speaker and antenna | CDMA chip in yellow | 5MP camera |
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The keyboard module | Frame | DROID 2 at pieces |
