The Fire phone also houses chips from Synaptics Inc and Skyworks Solutions Inc, said the repair outfit, which made a name for itself taking apart devices like Apple Inc’s iPhone and identifying its internal components.
Amazon’s maiden smartphone, which includes four cameras that track a user’s head movements to enable special screen effects, ships this week to customers in the United States and is powered by a Qualcomm quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor.
The $600-plus device thrusts Amazon into a fiercely competitive smartphone market dominated by Apple and devices running Google Inc’s Android software.
It also feeds into Amazon’s core retail business. It touts a “Firefly” feature that can recognize objects and direct users to the same item on Amazon’s online store.
Apart from the quartet of head-tracking cameras, the phone also includes a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera.
The device opened by iFixit included 32 gigabytes of NAND memory chips made by Samsung for storing pictures, music and other media. The phone, which has a 4.7 inch LCD display, included 2 gigabytes of DRAM memory from Samsung.
Manufacturers of mobile hardware often employ more than one supplier for memory chips and other components in their devices.
The handset included a near field communication chip, enabling features such as mobile payments, from NXP, according to iFixit.
The Fire smartphone also employs a touchscreen controller from Synaptics, and a communications chip from Skyworks.
The “Fire” is priced at $649 contract-free or $199.99 with a contract with AT&T Inc – in the same neighborhood as the iPhone. The price is a departure from the e-commerce company’s strategy of pricing Kindle Fire tablets at near-cost to sell its other products and services. It has specifications similar to high- and mid-range smartphones and runs on a modified version of Google’s Android operating system.
source: interaksyon.com
