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iPhone 3G Teardown Revealed On Video

If you're interested in looking beneath the iPhone's pretty case and seeing what makes it tick, the folks at TechOnline have posted a couple of "Teardown TV" videos, which pry the 3G model apart and reveal the chips inside.

First, a warning that you should skip the initial 2:12 of the first video, which has the usual lame attempt at techie humor (something about getting the iPhone to work in Canada). I also love how they tell you not to try opening up your iPhone at home. (Reminds me of the time my then-five-year-old threw a nickel into the VCR, shorting it out.)

Anyway, so these two videos are pretty dry stuff, but they do reveal what a marvel of downsized engineering the iPhone is. Indeed, the 3G model is even more streamlined than the first-generation phone. As dude number two notes on the tape, everything's crammed onto one printed-circuit board (which appears to be folded up to fit into the case), instead of two separate substrates used in the initial model.

Samsung supplies the iPhones' main processor. Infineon apparently cleaned up on the 3G, getting tapped by Apple to provide the Infineon UMTS transceiver, which is one of the key 3G chips in the device. (UMTS stands for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System.) Infineon also supplies the RF (radio-frequency) chip which sends and receives phone calls to the cell towers, the power-management chip, and the GPS chip.

Triquint supplies a bunch of W-CDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) modules; this is more 3G stuff. There's flash memory from Intel, SST, and Toshiba. STMicroelectronics makes the phone's accelerometer. This is the thing which determines when you've flipped the screen sideways.

OK, here are the two teardown videos, followed by a reprise of my iStore line-stalking video.

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