T-Mobile G1 Teardown

 

Teardown

Teardowns provide a look inside a device and should not be used as disassembly instructions.

Member-Contributed Guide

An awesome member of our community made this guide. It is not managed by iFixit staff.

 

Overview of the G1 hardware with circuit diagrams and labeled chips. Also see www.phoneWreck.com for more in-depth analysis.

Edit Step 1 T-Mobile G1 Teardown  

• The G1 has a lot of meaning to the “1″ in its name. Not only is it the first phone to sport Google’s Android OS, it’s:

  • the first phone to use T-Mobile’s 3G network.

  • HTC’s first capacitive touchscreen phone.

  • HTC’s first trackball phone.

  • HTC's second attempt at a 5-row keyboard (correct me if I’m wrong).

• We have aggregated information from various articles to aid in our teardown. These include Bob Widenhofer’s article featured on TechOnline, Nikkei Electronics Teardown Squad featured on TechOn, and of course, our own sources (Thank you!).

Edit Step 3  

• The T-Mobile G1 was a mind-blowing experience to crack open. There’s an insane number of parts, and the way they put it together seems, well, complex. Make sure you give the sliding mechanisms a peek near the bottom.

• Finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The back of the casing, showcases swooping action (we’re seriously too in love).

• The translational springs on this puppy are strong as !&&*. But it needs to be so, since it has to drive a large screen around an arc. It’s interesting to note how much effort HTC seems to have put in to produce a clean swooping action. Perhaps we’re overthinking this.

Edit Step 4  

• For starters though, we introduce to you, the block diagram:

  • The Qualcomm MSM7201A, which was previously used in later US iterations of the Touch Diamond and the Touch Pro, comes full force in the G1.

  • Similar to the BlackBerry Storm, the GPS and audio processing components are embedded into the processor.

  • Fortunately, HTC has had much experience using the processor, although it runs a brand new OS.

  • Running alongside the processor is the transceiver and power management ICs, Qualcomm RTR5285, and Qualcomm PM7540, respectively.