[Android Phone Teardown] Panasonic-branded Main Board [Part 3]

Oct 28, 2008 21:16 Nikkei Electronics, Teardown Squad

Continued from [Android Phone Teardown] Antenna in Camouflage [Part 2].

In the next step, we began to remove the main board.

The engineer looked over the board and said, "This is a board manufactured by Panasonic, isn't it?"

The character "M," the first letter of Matsushita, was seen on the board. The board was about 1.1mm thick. The engineer said that Panasonic's boards are used in many of the smartphones recently made by High Tech Computer Corp (HTC) of Taiwan.

Module for compass function

A camera module was connected to the main board with a long flexible substrate. On one side of the main board, opposite to the side with the connecting terminal for this flexible substrate, there was a silver-colored module with a size of about 4.5 × 4.5mm.

Characters printed on the module read "AKM8976A," which turned out to mean Asahi Kasei EMD Corp's magnetometric sensor module for a compass function.

T-Mobile USA Inc announced that the T-Mobile G1 is the first smartphone equipped with a compass function. One of the sales points of this handset is its ability to display the scene in the direction the user is facing by combining Google Inc's "Street View" and the compass function. And we found this new function was realized by a Japanese manufacturer.

• [Android Phone Teardown] Chassis Pried Open [Part 1]
• [Android Phone Teardown] Antenna in Camouflage [Part 2]
• [Android Phone Teardown] 2nd Vibration Motor Found [Part 4]
• [Android Phone Teardown] G1 Uses Same Trackball as BlackBerry [Part 5]


• [Android Phone] User-developed Application Successfully Installed
• [Android Phone] Multi-touch Feature Unavailable; Battery Charged via mini USB

• Nikkei Electronics Teardown Squad

24 Hours | 7 Days