phoneWreck

BlackBerry Presenter – Review and Teardown

Here at phonewreck, we’ve found our audience is interested in both phones and other related consumer electronic devices. We’ve been humming and hawing about new devices that we’d really like to play with when the BlackBerry Presenter pretty much landed on our laps.

In the realm of Bluetooth accessories, this thing is by far one of the most complicated we’ve seen to date. With a ~$200 price-tag, we thought it would be nice to take it through it’s paces and rip it apart to see what makes it beat.

Review after the jump! Make sure to follow @DrWreck on twitter.

Our first impression of the BlackBerry presenter is: Glorius. VGA peripherals are often too light and the heavy guage cable can make it difficult to place them on the desk (pico projector’s etc.). RIM has done a wonderful job of co-designing a hefty device that won’t suffer from this plight. In true BlackBerry form, this device ships with a fantastic faux leather case – complete with magnetic flap. Pulling this baby out at a conference or small presentation is sure to raise some questions – it’s a fairly clever application.

Moving around the back of the device, we can see the VGA, S-video and microUSB ports as well as a NTSC/PAL switch.

Once again, things are solid, minimal and the spacing between ports won’t cause any issues.

The hardware is great – it looks sexy and makes sense. Now, how about it’s functionality!

Boom. Roasted.

This particular device barely worked. In fact, the team only saw it display a presentation once (in about 15 tries) and we were too disappointed in the quality to take photos. The highest native resolution is 1024×768 – missing out on wide-screen supported resolutions seems like an over-sight. That said, most .ppt’s are developed in a 4:3 aspect ratio so it does make sense.

The process of getting this thing working should be simple:

1. Plug it into a VGA or S-video display

2. Plug it into the wall

3. Download the BlackBerry app via some obscure URL you must manually input into your device

4. Load said .ppt onto your BlackBerry

5. Connect to the BlackBerry Presenter via Bluetooth (passkey is on the bottom of the device and displayed on-screen)

6. Launch BB app

7. Select Presentation

8. Click your ball/pad and select “present”

9. Receive a connection Error

10. Reconnect Via bluetooth

11. Receive Error

12. Unplug everything

13. Receive Error

14. Reinstall Everything

15. Works, yay!

16. Receive Error

17. Wonder why you didn’t buy a netbook to “display” your .ppt’s natively using Powerpoint.

………

17 steps! Yikes, I have a feeling we’ve got a lemon here. To it’s credit it makes for a perfectly sized skipping stone. Once, it even displayed our ppt long enough for full-navigation. Unfortunately the font was not recognized and our slide transitions were choppy. Any gradiated colours look washed out and grainy – we’re pretty sure it only displays 256 colours.

You can also manually load a .ppt to the device while it is connected via USB. It has 8MB of internal memory. Luckily the device won’t display video’s or any other rich media within your presentation so 8MB should be good for about 30 slides with images.

Unfortunately, you can’t navigate the presentations without a BlackBerry. There are no nav buttons on the device itself. Can’t get your BB to connect? You’re out of luck.

Now, don’t get us wrong. We’ve seen this device work and we really do like the application. Our impression of the functionality is that the BlackBerry App converts the .ppt to a low quality jpeg, and sends it OTA via Bluetooth to the presenter which cache’s the content and then displays it. In a way, it seems like an unnecessary step – why can’t we just connect our BlackBerry straight to a presentation device (monitor or projector)? BlackBerry Devices are first and foremost professional grade smart-phones designed for business related applications. Forking out an additional ~$200 bucks for “video-out capabilities” seems overly redundant. Is there an IC that would allow this transaction? Let us know!

In summary, the device looks great but doesn’t work very well. Thankfully (as mentioned before) it’s hefty. It makes a really cool-looking and solid paperweight.

Dr.Wreck’s score: 3 perfectly sized skipping stones out of 10

Now to take it apart!

The underside of the device has a rubber pad. The 4, T7 hex screws holding it together can be found there. Peel it away.

Once these screws are out, the upper portion of the chassis will pull away from the base-plate and logic board.

Don’t pry on the PCB – it’s secured in place via the VGA port. Use pliers or a very small (5mm) wrench to loosen the “screws”.

That’s it! The PCB should fall into your lap! Let’s take a look at what’s on it.

Texas Instruments literally has a monopoly on this PCB. The Digital Media System on a Chip (DMSoC) is a derivative of the historical and popular TMS320 device (DSP). This particular device also known as the DaVinci Video Processor, has a single ARM9 core, 32KB of RAM a hardware accelerator and co-processor. We estimate it’s running at ~220MHz.

The external video ports runs through a TV Encoder manufactured by FOCUS enhancements. This particular device, part of the FS45x family takes digital video or computer graphics and converts to high quality analog video. These devices exist in products that deliver really high quality content – it makes us wonder what the problem was here with the BlackBerry Presenter. Our thoughts are that the images were scaled and compressed to make Bluetooth transmission faster and more seamless. Output resolutions of 480P to 1080i can be achieved with these devices.

The PMIC is also designed by Texas Instruments – the device is actually designed for Lithium Ion Powered Systems but RIM (or it’s 3rd party designer) found an application in this device.

The flash win went to STMicroelectronics and Numonyx/Micron with an MCP (Multi-Chip package) that includes both memory and RAM. By the looks of it, this is a a 1GBit NAND with 512Mbit of DRAM – only 8MB of storage is made available to the user.

Lastly we move onto the most interesting part of the board, the Bluetooth IC. Look like a product from the well-known Bluetooth IC provider CSR. The BC6450A, a member of the BlueCore family has a -90dBm receiver sensitivity and comes in a very small 3.49×3.21 WLCSP (wafter level chip scale package).