2011 is the year of the tablet and it
seems like every major brand has
released their own version each of them
calling themselves an iPad killer we
took apart the Samsung Galaxy Tab and we
took apart the Motorola Xoom
so today's teardown comes to us from
Research In Motion hi I'm MJ with iFixit
and today we're going to take a look at
what makes research and motions playbook
tick there are already a lot of reviews
about the PlayBook floating around on
the internet so we're going to focus on
what we do best and that's open it up
and compare out its internals matchup
against the competition our teardown
ninjas were happy to discover that
unlike the iPad 2 no heat gun was
necessary to get into the PlayBook all
they needed was a simple plastic opening
tool and a little bit of prying which
scores points for repair ability right
from the beginning what's fair on the
inside we were a little surprised to
discover that all the internals are
actually housed in the display assembly
not in the rear case like most other
tablets that's kind of unfortunate
because that means for simple repairs
like replacing the battery you're
actually going to have to remove the
whole motherboard first
fortunately the screws we found holding
the motherboard in place were all
standard Phillips double zero screws so
you won't need a fancy-pants screwdriver
just to remove them and that's always a
plus in fact the only thing holding the
motherboard in place for a couple of
screws and a couple of cables and that's
no challenge to our veteran
disassemblers it was at this point that
we noticed that there are no less than
eight sockets in the PlayBook belonging
to Texas Instruments who also makes the
one gigahertz ohm at 4430 processor all
of this is sure to translate to a decent
amount of dollars going straight to
Texas Instruments with every playbook
purchase after we got a good look at the
battery we turned our attention to the
camera assembly and while it may not
look like much for a tablet the
playbooks cameras are pretty hefty it's
three megapixel front-facing camera
crushes the iPad 2's VGA camera and its
rear facing camera is 5 megapixels and
shoots 1080p video and while I'm not
sure tablets form-factor really lends
itself to video capture it's clear that
research in motion was able to integrate
higher quality cameras without jacking
up the price of their device evidently
Apple missed the memo on that one one
drawback is that the volume controls and
the camera assembly are all one big
assembly so that makes replacing the
power
button or the volume control a pretty
costly venture once we got it all apart
we're able to answer our favorite
question just how repairable is the
PlayBook on a scale of one to ten one
being the least repairable and ten being
the most the PlayBook got a respectable
7 we only use two tools during the
entire disassembly the playbooks biggest
liability is it's difficult to reach
battery software-wise we've heard it's
still a bit iffy but from a hardware
perspective we think research in motion
has a good game plan with the playbook
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repairing