Motorola DROID 2 Teardown

The Motorola DROID 2 launched just yesterday and already iFixit has it’s hands on one to teardown. The teardown was put online yesterday and shows all of the insides of the DROID 2 and what is different to the original DROID that launched last year.

The new DROID 2 has a 1GHz processor along with wireless 802.11n for connectivity. Both these enhance the user experience on the device by allowing it to run more smoothly and connect faster where wireless n technology is available to connect to.

Although there are differences between the two models, there are also a lot of similarities. Motorola seems to have opted to keep anything that wasn’t complained about and fix the things that were complained about such as the keyboard and processor that have both received upgrades.

The battery on the DROID 2 is identical to the original DROID. However, the DROID 2 somehow is capable of squeezing more life out of it’s battery with a 49% improvement on battery life compared to the older model.

The battery on the DROID 2 is removable unlike the iPhone 4 which says you should not remove it. This is certainly handy for those wanting a new battery.

The camera is 5 megapixels and has a dual LED flash. The camera can record at DVD quality at 6 more frames per second than the original DROID.

* The Droid 2 uses the same 3.7 inch, Full WVGA, 854×480 TFT LCD as the original Droid.ยจ
* After de-routing the ribbon cable through the slider mechanism, the keyboard can be easily removed from the back of the slider bracket. We believe that you can transplant a Droid 2 keyboard into your old Droid (they look identical internally), but we haven’t performed complete compatibility testing yet.
* The camera board is actually a separate circuit board that can be easily removed from the motherboard, just like in the original.
* We suspect that a TI OMAP 3630 processor is buried beneath an Elpida K4332C1PD package, which appears to be a DDR mobile RAM chip. We’ll have Chipworks investigate this further.
* The Droid 2 has a SanDisk SDIN4C2 8 GB NAND flash package soldered to the main board. This part wasn’t included in the original Droid. The Droid 2 only comes with a 8 GB micro SD card, so its storage capacity out the box is the same as the original. We didn’t investigate how Android handles the filesystem being split across two physical devices.
* The TI WL1271B WLAN Bluetooth/FM chip gives the Droid 2 802.11n capability, a substantial upgrade over the Droid’s 802.11g.

The full teardown and images of all the steps can be found at iFixit.

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