Teardown: Palm Pre and Palm Touchstone disasembled

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On June 8, 2009, in Cell Phones, Geeky, Hardware, Tips and Tutorials, by Admin Staff

The clever people at iFixit are getting really good at this! Palm Pre and its new innovative charging kit, the Touchstone hasn’t been out officially for too long and yet when it arrived into the hands of the iFixit team, it was doomed to be dissected and disasembled (in a safe way though).

There are plenty of pictures at the source link below, we’ve picked out some of the main highlights for you to check out.

Its always interesting to hear what the disasembly shows. With the Palm Pre, it looks like its not going to be an easy phone to service should anything goes wrong in the future. Here are the highlights of what the iFixit team found…

* In general, this Palm hardware reminds us a lot more of Apple’s engineering style than any of hardware we’ve taken apart by other manufacturers (like Dell).
* The Pre logic board is substantially smaller than the iPhone logic board, which is very impressive considering how renowned Apple’s engineers are for shrinking hardware footprints.
* We identified a liquid submersion sensor in the Pre, visible through the micro USB port.
* Some parts of the software feel rushed. For example, the app store describes the price of free apps as “$Try now.” It looks like an overeager programmer hardcoded that dollar sign. While certainly not a showstopper, we hope Palm gets a chance to tidy up the little things like this soon.
* We tested out Sprint’s 3G EVDO network on the road home and didn’t notice any interruptions. Uploads and downloads were fast, and Pandora’s application ran like a champ.
* A prepaid plastic recycling envelope is included in the box, making it easy to recycle your newly obsolete phone.
* The Pre’s battery capacity is 1150 mAh, exactly the same as the iPhone 3G, though the Pre is reported to have slightly worse battery life due to its background process capability. The battery is user-replaceable, something the iPhone fails to offer.
* The Palm Pre is the first phone to use Texas Instrument’s new OMAP3 (Open Media Applications Processor) platform.
* The processor is a 600 MHz ARM Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX 530 GPU + 430MHz C64x + DSP + ISP (Image Signal Processor)
* The Pre is definitely not an easy phone to service. There are lots of fragile and tricky tabs that will make putting the phone back together challenging.