The Amazon's new Fire Phone is not DIY friendly. Or so say the folks at iFixit, who published a teardown on the new smartphone yesterday, giving it a ranking of 3 out of 10 for repairability, with 10 being the easiest to fix.
The gadget repair experts warned that the phone is not modular, with components often sharing cables. Also, the four extra cameras on the front, that track a user's head movements to enable special screen effects, make things much more difficult, as they are difficult to replace individually.
iFixit noted that the construction of the Fire Phone is similar to the iPhone 5 because of its bottom screws. Also, there is no carrier logo, suggesting that more carriers, besides AT&T, will eventually sell the device.
The teardown reveals that the phone contains chips from Qualcomm, NXP, and Samsung Electronics. While the device's radio frequency, power amplifier, audio, and Wi-Fi chips are from Qualcomm, 32GB of NAND memory chips, used for photo, music, and media storage, and 2GB of DRAM memory chips come from Samsung.
NXP contributed a near field communication chip, enabling features such as mobile payments. The smartphone also includes a touch screen controller from Synaptics, and a communications chip from Skyworks.
Priced at $649 contract-free or $199.99 with a contract with AT&T, the 4.7-inch Fire Phone sports a Qualcomm 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU, Adreno 330 GPU, 2GB RAM, a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, and a 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera. The device hit stores this week and has received lukewarm reviews.
