Old-school: Tearing apart your smartphone just to get a glimpse of what’s inside and to see how a manufacturer has crammed the parts and pieces into a super-slim frame.
New-school? Tossing that smartphone under an X-ray machine and letting technology do the work for you, sparing you from having to purchase all kinds of tiny tools and possibly wreck your phone something good in the process.
At least, that’s the impression we get from checking out Engadget’s latest pictures of a Samsung Galaxy S III under the ol’ X-ray. As it turns out, one of the site’s readers apparently has access to a hospital digital mammography machine, which helps him both save lives and scan smartphones during the downtime.
However, the drawbacks of the X-ray are pretty apparent at first glance – pardon the pun. While the technique gives interested smartphone owners a way to see just how meticulously their device was assembled, they’re left to their own guesswork as to which component is which.
To that, however, we turn to iFixit’s previously posted Samsung Galaxy S III teardown – an eight-step guide that covers a bunch of different components that can be removed from the smartphone itself. That includes the simple bits like the phone’s 2100 mAh battery (newbie removal) to more complicated techniques like removing the smartphone’s entire mainboard to get a glimpse at its Melfas 8PL533 touch sensor – a chip that transforms your screen presses into binary language.
The Samsung Galaxy S III sports either an Exynos 4412 quad-core A9 processor or a dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, depending on whether you purchased it in the United States or internationally. One gigabyte of RAM – DDR2 Green Memory, as identified by iFixit – comes with the international versions, whereas United States-based Samsung Galaxy S III smartphones get bumped up to a full two gigabytes. Korea wins the day on specifications though, as Samsung Galaxy S III smartphones released there come with the quad-core processor and two gigabytes of memory.
Also depending on your location and provider, the smartphone packs 16, 32, or 64 gigabytes of storage. The last one is a bit of a sticking point for United States Samsung fans, however, as the company has yet to release a 64-variant of the phone stateside.
But as we recently reported, Samsung’s intention is to deliver a 64-gigabyte version of the Galaxy S III at some point “during the second half of this year,” said Samsung vice president Teri Daley in a statement.
Copyright © 2010 Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc