Motofone F3 Porn¶
530 words
After I destroyed my first Motofone F3 with a washing machine (the second one is still working, thanks, but the battery seems to be crap and only last half as long as the old one did) a closer look was taken at the hardware.
On the first level the phone looks easy to disassemble with four accessible screws holding the case on, some twists removing the plastic frame and four further screws fixing the board with the main chips on the main board with the display and keys:
I rather enjoyed the fact that the phone’s speaker wasn’t even soldered to the rest of the device but is being held in place by the rest of the case and its magnetism with little springs making sure the eletrical magic can work. I like that:
Further disassembly of the phone turned out to be hard, the long main board is partly glued together and I don’t think this can be disassembled in a non-destructive way. Not by me anyway. Hence the destructive path was chosen. This is the bottom side of the back of the board with the connector for the small other board at the top right.
The golden/orange patches used to be covered by shiny black bits of plastic:
Opening Breaking those shows that there’s something shiny (crystal?) inside. Having an idea about electronics might help here. The keypad is driven by little metal thingies stuck to a sheet of plastic. Quite common apparently for bad keyboards:
Putting that sheet on a table and pressing the ‘buttons’ makes funny popping noises just as popping the bubbles of bubble-wrap does. Just that you don’t run out of bubbles here. Keeps me amused for hours!
And then there’s the front of the main board with the contacts for the keys as well as the display. The e-paper seems to be hidden beneath a plastic cover. The cover is stuck to it and an attempt to remove it didn’t look good.
That’s a shame really. I certainly would have loved to find a simple way of using the display. But I assume that controlling it may be quite complex and there were many ‘wires’ in the board vanishing in the screen.
Then there’s the tiny daughterboard with what seem to be the chips doing the work - and and edge as well as a few of the tiny components broken off. Contacts for the SIM card as well as those going to the battery can be seen. The chip seems to be by Texas Instruments and its number is T3031DZPH [6BEY19T L G1] (analog components and power management ‘sister’ chip called Triton belonging a chip on the other side)
The back side of the daugherboard contains more chips as well as the connector for hooking things up to the main board. Another Texas Instruments chip reads D6928BMIZPH [6BANHFW $N GI] (Single Chip Baseband Processor for network stuff, encoding, display, ringtones…) Finally there is the SKY77518-11 chip which apparently has something to do with transmitting the signal.
Finally - within the quality limits of my tiny camera - a closeup of the broken daughterboard revealing that it’s a multi-layer affair:
