Those pentalobe screwdriver-wielding rascals at iFixit have got their hands on an iPhone 4S and on Thursday published another one of their patented teardowns. Buried amidst all the Siri jokes, there's plenty to learn in the latest iFixit report.
Let's start with the chip. The iPhone 4S is powered by Apple's new dual-core, 1GHz A5 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) processor. Puzzling out all the letters and numbers printed on the A5 casing, iFixit figures it's got 512MB of DDR2 memory.
On to the battery. The iPhone 4S battery may resemble the power pack in the older iPhone 4, but don't be fooled—"it appears that the connectors are different shapes," reports iFixit, so popping one of the new batteries into last year's iPhone model probably isn't possible.
The iFixit team reckons that the new battery has an extra 0.5 WHrs as compared with the one in the iPhone 4. For some reason the new smartphone gets 100 hours less standby time on its battery, according to iFixit, though the iPhone 4S does provide continuous talk time of eight hours on the 3G network, or one more hour than you get on the iPhone 4.
You're getting up to 14 hours of talk time on the GSM network with the iPhone 4S, which is unchanged from the iPhone 4, the teardown artists say.
Prying off a bunch of EMI shields, iFixit gets its first peek at the L-shaped iPhone 4S logic board. Here are the chips they found: The aforementioned Apple A5 application processor, Qualcomm's RTR8605 multi-band/mode RF transceiver, Skyworks' 77464-20 load-insensitive power amplifier (LIPA) module for WCDMA applications, Avago's ACPM-7181 power amplifier, and two parts from TriQuint, the TQM9M9030 multi-mode quad-band power amplifier module and the TQM66052, which iFixit figures may be a PA-duplexer module.
Of course, that's just one side of the iPhone 4S board. On the other side, iFixit finds the following: Qualcomm's MDM6610 chipset, which is an upgrade from the iPhone 4's MDM6600, the team notes, Apple's own 338S0973 integrated circuit, which reportedly handles power management, and Toshiba's 24-nanometer THGVX1G7D2GLA08 NAND flash memory module, all 16GB of it.
The display, according to iFixit, is the same 960-by-460 pixel Retina display that first appeared in the iPhone 4—so much for new and improved, eh, Apple haters? But wait—iFixit notes that "the hardware might not be new, but the iPhone's display is still impressive" and "[g]raphics performance is also likely to be improved with the A5 powering it."
Next up is the vibrator motor, which iFixit discovers is the same one in the Verizon iPhone 4, e.g. the "the linear oscillating vibrator" as to AT&T iPhone 4's rotational electric motor. That's a good thing, the team declares, because the "vibrator motor is quieter, softer, and all-around less annoying than its counter-weighted predecessor."
One highly touted improvement to the new iPhone is its 8-megapixel, rear-facing camera. This finely tuned little number delivers 33 percent faster photo snaps than its predecessor according to Apple and also gets far better low-light performance. You can also shoot HD video at 1080p with it.
Lastly, the iFixit team tears open the iPhone 4S's front-facing VGA camera to find that it's "good for two things:"
"1. Communicating via FaceTime
"2. Taking self-portraits a la MySpace Facebook Google+"
L, as they say, OL.