Diversity comes to email devices: A comparative teardown

Also, if you've done your own teardowns of interesting devices and want to publish them across print and online, contact Patrick Mannion at pmannion@cmp.com.

Recent product launches of the Q from Motorola and the E61 from Nokia illustrate the importance of the pocket-friendly, QWERTY keyboard e-mail phone (e-mail machine) in the product portfolios of cell phone makers. With the success of Research In Motion (RIM) Ltd. and Palm Inc., which have historically focused on integrating voice and e-mail capabilities into a handset with QWERTY keyboard, other leading cell phone makers have followed suit by bringing similar devices to market.

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Thin is in--Motorola Q
Borrowing from the success of the ultrathin Razr, the Q from Motorola Inc. set a new benchmark in thinness for an e-mail machine: 14 mm. Motorola strategically depopulated areas of the pc board to allow the nesting of major subassemblies, like the display and battery, against open areas of the board.

Other industrial design techniques Motorola employed to keep the Q on a diet included an EL keypad backlight to avoid LED diffuser thickness; planar antennas, which conform largely to case walls; and placement of the acoustic assembly, camera module and antenna outside other mechanical stackups. Pushing subassemblies to the ends stretches the Motorola Q by 5 mm compared with the 110-mm height of the RIM BlackBerry 8700c.

At the heart of the Motorola Q, a Marvell Technology Group Ltd. PXA270C5312 provides the applications processing, while a Qualcomm Inc. MSM6500 two-dice analog baseband/ digital baseband package enables cdma2000 1xEV-DO communications. The two-chip architecture, provides design flexibility but incurs a board space and cost penalty, with each processor occupying a unique socket and requiring a separate memory subsystem.