TechOnline has cracked open the iPhone 3G to find out what makes it tick. They’ve released detailed diagrams as well as some videos of the dissection.
Calling this an incremental update, they note that the changes seem to be additions and improvements rather than a total rebuild of the original platform. They get into the nitty gritty, discussing not only the layout and structure, but even the importance of each chip manufacturer.
Some of the improvements are obvious, like 3G. Others include the battery not being permanently attached, and the headphone jack being flush mounted. Most of the changes were in who manufactured each chip.
[via TUAW]
I work for Triquint and was stoked to hear we were in the new iPhone. Though the most I could get out of anyone was a “neither confirm nor deny” speech. Now if we can just muscle what remains of Skyworks and Infineon out…
infineon pmb2525 hammerhead 2 gps chip.
there has been some privacy concerns over built in gps so what would happen if you took an exacto knife to the gps chip and removed the chip?
yould that disable the gps so others could not track you?
no alex jones
gsm tracking is done from the towers and is much more accurate than gps
gps is receive only, your tin foil hat won’t help you
I’m sorry, “gsm tracking… is much more accurate than gps”? On what planet?
jonhy, I think you meant “gsm tracking is much ‘less’ accurate than gps”. At least I hope that’s what you meant. And although gps is truly receive only, a phone is certainly not. So when you put the two together, your device could transmit your exact geographic coordinates over the wireless data network. In fact you would probably want it to do just that in some cases.
Imagine a “find your phone” app where you logon to a computer and ask where your phone is when you can’t find it. That would be very useful to an absent-minded person like myself.
I would hope that any cell phone manufacturer would have the means to turn off the GPS receiver in the phone to conserve battery power, especially someone like Apple. Now I can see LG not having that function in the MiGo Phone, but for something like the iPhone, yeah I would hope you could turn it off.
Steve, A buddy of mine works for Motorola and they have a phone that does just that. In fact he has one for his mother who has alzheimer’s, and had to use once or twice to find her.