Blackberry Torch拆解报告( )

What's inside the Blackberry Torch?

by Dylan McGrath

Research in Motion Inc.'s new Blackberry Torch contains parts made by CSR Inc., Synaptics Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Sandisk Corp., among others, and carries a total bill of materials cost of $171.05, according to a teardown analysis of the device conducted by market research firm iSuppli Corp.

Also found inside the Torch were an integrated baseband from Marvell Technology Group Ltd., a 3-axis accelerometer made by Analog Devices Inc., Infineon Technologies AG's PMB5701 tri-band RF transceiver, Renesas Electronics Corp.s R2A60177BG quad-band RF transceiver and Texas Instruments Inc.'s WL1271x WLAN/BlueTooth IC, according to iSuppli (El Segundo, Calif.).

For the first time in any product teardown it has conducted, iSuppli also found a GPS chip from CSR inside the Torch. The analysis further uncovered a controller IC from Synaptics, a 4-gigabyte eMMC NAND flash memory device from Samsung and a removable Micro SD memory card from SanDisk. The handset also features STMicroelectronics NV's STV0987 video/image processor, TI's TLV320AIC36IZQERaudio codec and CrucialTec Co. Ltd.'s optical trackpad assembly, according to iSuppli.

ISuppli was not able to identify the manufacturer of the Torch's display, but said that in the past RIM has employed displays from Samsung Mobile Display, Toshiba Mobile Display Co. Ltd. and Sharp.

The Torch features a number of firsts for a BlackBerry, including a Qwerty slider keyboard, a rewritten operating system and social feeds, universal search and a faster WebKit-based browser, according to iSuppli.

ISuppli's analysis concluded that the Torch bears some similarity to smartphones from other brands, including the Tilt 2 from HTC Corp., Motorola Inc.'s Droid X and Microsoft Corp.'s Kin 2.

"On the inside, the Torch's electronic design heavily leverages subsystems used in previous members of the BlackBerry smartphone line, specifically the Storm2 and the Bold 9700," said Andrew Rassweiler, principal analyst and teardown services manager at iSuppli.

When adding in an estimated manufacturing cost of $12, the Torch's combined production and BOM cost amounts to $183.05, according to iSuppli. By comparison, a June teardown analysis by iSuppli found that the 16-gigabyte version of Apple Inc.'s iPhone 4 carries a bill of materials cost of $187.51.