Palm Pre Teardown and Analysis – Review coming Soon!

If you haven’t had a chance yet, make sure to check out our Sprint Palm Pre design analysis! Check out the UI Review!

Note: Most images are courtesy of www.ifixit.com

PhoneWreck - PreIso

Here it is, the phone we’ve been ramping up for since it was first unveiled earlier this year.

This puppy has been touted by many as the venerable iPhone killer. Here at phonewreck, we’ll be taking this thing through it’s paces over the weekend and the next few days in order to give you, our readers a proper review that includes benchmarks for all of the functions this device can perform.

Make sure and keep it locked on www.phonewreck.com as we continue to put our Palm Pre from Sprint under the wrecking ball.

Fortunately for you guys, we had a chance to work with the gentlemen/women over at ifixit to get some high quality images of the PCB. These people  really have their stuff together and resorted at nothing to be the first with a fully documented teardown of both the pre and the pre touchstone charger.

Anyways, enough rambling from us – we know why you guys are here. Time to get our hands dirty and see what makes the pre hummmmmmmmm.

Oh and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS to keep posted as the updates come!

PhoneWreck - Palm Pre Block Diagram

There are some pretty interesting things that popped up on the Pre’s PCB’s. This is the first production device we’ve seen on the OMAP3 (Open Media Applications Processor) platform. OMAP3 is powered by the 600MHZ ARM Cortex A8, PowerVR SGX 530 (GPU), 430MHz C64x, DSP and ISP (Image Signal Processor) and was clearly designed to pack a punch – Dr. Wreck thinks we’re going to see this processor popping up in future netbook endeavours.

On the connections side we see the usual wifi/bluetooth combo going to Marvell and CSR with the W8686 and 63823 respectively. We also see the BaseBand win going to Qualcomm with the heavily integrated MSM6801A platform. The OMAP3 PMIC comes loaded with a USB tranceiver and Audio codec which even further reduces the overall board density of this device. We’re not fully sure – but it looks as if the Pre’s cool new multi-touch Touch Screen Controller win went to Cypress Semiconductor with the CP6944BA device.

The device packs a 1150mAh battery – just like the iPhone 3G.

More Info after the Break!

PhoneWreck - Pre Comm. Board 1

On the top of the communications board we can spot the BaseBand Processor (Qualcomm MSM6801A), SDRAM, RF power amp and Duplexer by TriQuint.

PhoneWreck - Pre Comm. Board 2

On the bottom of the communications board we can spot the BaseBand PMIC (Maxim MAX8695Q), RF Transmitter (RFT6150) and the RF Tranceiver (RFR6500) both by Qualcomm.

PhoneWreck - Palm Pre Logic Board

On the main logic board, we see the OMAP3 PMIC – the Texas Instruments TWL5030. As mentioned before, this PMIC is packed with a USB Traceiver as well as Audio Codec. We also see the Bluetooth and Wifi Tranceivers with the earlier discussed wins from both Marvell and CSR. This device contains a microUSB port and 8GB of internal memory from Samsung.

Elpida offers up some mobile DDR memory and is stacked on top of the venerable OMAP3 processor. We’ll have to wait and see how this thing benchmarks.

PhoneWreck - Pre Camera

PhoneWreck - Pre full explode

And there you have it! Thanks again to ifixit for the wonderful teardown scans and images. Make sure and pop over there if you want to see how they took it apart!

Keep posted as we plan on continually releasing Palm Pre content over the next week!

Until next time, Keep WRECKING and make sure to grab our RSS and follow Dr.Wreck on Twitter! Also be sure to check out our Palm Pre Design analysis or UI review!

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