Oh The Humanity: RapidRepair Tears Down the iPhone 3G S

The iPhone 3G S, Fully Disassembled, courtesy of RapidRepair.com

You knew someone would do it. Just because they could. The guys over at RapidRepair.com flew to Paris to purchase the iPhone 3G S at an Orange Boutique store the stroke of midnight, just so they could diassemble it into its component pieces.

No, they're not sadistic -- they're in the business of doing 3rd-party cellphone repairs, specializing in iPhones and iPods.

Click on the "Read the rest of this entry" link below for more.

RapidRepair has done a great job of identifying all the major components on the 3GS system board. Of particular interest to me is that Apple seems to have retained Infineon as the vendor of the integrated Baseband Processor/Transceiver for GSM/HSDPA 3G connectivity, which many have speculated has been the Achilles Heel in the data performance in the device on AT&T and other GSM/HSDPA mobile networks. From our RapidRepair friends:

The transceiver is either the exact same or slightly revised from the iPhone 3G’s.  Infineon makes the transceiver and baseband processors for the Apple’s iPhone 3G S, but due to a nasty habit of rebranding nearly all the chips we are not sure exactly which model they are using, it’s one of these, http://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/channel.html?channel=db3a3043132679fb011329baf0c700da. We will continue to work to determine exactly which transceiver and baseband processor they are using.

So it appears that the chipset may have changed to a newer variant or a newer generation of the Infineon Baseband processor used in the previous model. I suspect this may have been done in order to speed the development process of the device so major drivers would not need to be completely re-written for such an important part of the integrated system. Let's hope that the newer generation transceiver in the 3G S is more reliable than the older one in the 3G.

Also See: RapidRepair iPhone 3G S Teardown Gallery