BlackBerry Bold Teardown

BlackBerry’s latest flagship, the Bold, is definitely a bold piece of hardware. Users stepping up from the Curve or the 8800 should find yourselves totally at home, with tons of extra features at your disposal including:

• A jaw-dropping 2.65" HVGA screen.
• Very impressive sound. This, coupled with a really great screen, give the Bold a really strong media playback experience.
• Top notch performance. Marvell’s Hermon Processor running at a speedy 624MHz chews down on any of the applications you want running.
• A freakishly fast QWERTY keyboard.
• Lightning fast sideloading of music and videos. A 700MB movie file was transferred in 48 seconds, making for a speedy 14.6MBps transfer speed.

Here is where we get down to the nitty grittys of the device.

The Bold was as pleasurable to teardown as it was to review. Opening it up was simple, but the Bold gave us trouble when it let us look at its hallowed PCB. It’s a complicated mess there.

ICs seem to be relatively organized, but there are so many pieces to this puzzle, that it was a daunting task to build up the BOM and the block diagrams. Fortunately for you, we love doing this stuff. So we present to you, the BlackBerry Bold Block Diagram.

RIM spent a WHOLE TON of money on their new Samsung-made screen. It’s an expensive beast; but we’d say that it was totally worth it.

One of the questionable design choices was the integration of 802.11a. Implementing 802.11a, which is rarely used by anyone, meant that a dedicated power amp, antenna, and possibly the cause of another Wi-Fi-dedicated PMIC needed to be included.

Another thing to note is its antennas. Instead of the traditional metal prongs used in most phones, RIM has used what appear to be stickers. These pretty much surround the back of the device.

These placements of the antennas are educated guesses, however. What seem to be obvious placements of the antennas are due to the use cases (holding the phone to your head, or cradling the phone while browsing will cover up areas of the device).

View the main IC diagram here.

Samsung continues to impress with its multi-chip packaged MoviNAND+OneNAND+Mobile DDR.

Infineon and Renesas got big wins with their RF transceivers.

SiRF also makes a big entrance with the inclusion of its GPS + A-GPS functionality.

Cypress also seems to have the West Bridge thing down pact producing those speedy sideloading results noted earlier.

RIM seems to have spent quite a bit of money on TI’s audio codec and the results, as noted before, are staggering.

The Bold is a pleasure to use. It’s fast, it’s efficient, and it’s even friendly to you.