Zire71 small hardware review

Hi fellas, does anybody wants to know what’s inside you little friend? Well, we all know how it looks from outside , should be something like this:

Actually, _my_ zire looks a little bit different now, but it doesn’t matter. Ok, so let’s open it and see what’s inside. So , after removing the part which holds the capture button – we see a small speaker, and flexible cable going to palm universal connector.

Look at the speaker closer, although it is pretty small, it is powerful enough.

After removing the cover – it’s actually has nothing on it except the speaker:

Now zire is without a cover – under black plastic take you can(not) :=) see a 900mah li-ion battery. 4 white plastic parts marked with black arrow actually help slider to go smoothly and not scratch the plastic. The iron part marked with red arrow – is a holder that will top slider to opening all the way down.

Let’s open a bit more - now you can see most of the internals: SD slot, IR diodes, tiny camera. The black plastic label at the bottom is to protect the board from scratches when inserting stylus. The battery is closed with additional metal cover.

After removing this cover the battery reveals:

Although it may seem that battery is taking most of the space, it’s actually pretty thin, about ½ cm :

Under the battery there is just empty space of motherboard.

Well, here you can see a “heart” of the unit – cpu (processor) and memory chips,.
The processor is probably advanced most of all other hardware comparing to the previous palm models, like M515. It’s got even smaller and thinner , and despite it, it is very powerful ARM 175mhz (originally ) and lowered to 144mhz (to preserve battery life ). It is a Texas Instrument’s OMAP310 cpu. Despite it’s size, it can easily handle cpu-intensive 3d games, mp3 /ogg audio playback, and even Mpeg-4 decoding (Divx/Xvid movies). Here’s also screen with it’s electronics. At the bottom there is a 5-way joystick. At the top is a headphone plug, and camera connector. 4 small springs marked with red arrows are actually for the purpose of reducing damage to the screen when dropped for example. This very palm fell once from 1.5meters high to the granite floor – not a scratch!. .Hey, don’t get excited, it doesn’t mean you can throw it just like cigarette pack, the screen is still very gentle and fragile.

Screen itself, It has a plug to connect to the main board, and also 3 internal connectors, the top connector is digitizer, the bottom (small) is backlight diodes connector - without backlight the Zire71’s screen is almost invisible, since this is transflective screen technology. The mid connector (unplugged now) is a data connector for the screen matrix.

Look how actually small the camera lens is:


Seems all. Any comments? Additions? Corrections?
p.s: for more such reviews to go
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