BlackBerry PlayBook Teardown Reveals Neat-Freak Interior

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Remember when computers had removable batteries? Neither do I, but apparently they did. These days, the batteries come hidden away from the user, freed from their bulky cases so that device makers can squeeze more into smaller and smaller spaces. So it is with the BlackBerry PlayBook, freshly torn open by the ravenous zombies at iFixit. “Chipzzzz”, they cry as they rip into brand new electronics with their spudgers. “Chipzzz!”

But this hard to access battery (hidden behind the motherboard and speaker), along with a metal frame glues to the screen, is the only hard-to-repair part of RIM’s new miniature tablet. Everything else can be disassembled with standard tools, leading iFixit to give it a 7 out of 10 repairability rating.

So just what is inside? Well, the battery, of course, which is a 20 watt-hour model, compared to the 25 watt-hour battery in the iPad, and the 24 watt-hour in the Xoom. Then there are the camera, accelerometers, motherboard and so on, and these are all incredibly neatly lined up. It’s so tidy in there that the layout could have been designed by Rain Main.

Those speakers are promising, too. First, there are two of them. Second, each one is actually made up of two units. When I tried out the PlayBook at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, I couldn’t hear anything thanks to the trade-show acoustics, but steroe is certainly a step up from the iPad, and especially the iPad 2 which has a crappier sounding speaker than the original.

Otherwise, the PlayBook is much like any other tablet: A screen and a small board of chips, with the rest of the case filled up with batteries. To see the full (and neat and easy to repair) details, head over to iFixit.

BlackBerry PlayBook Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Miroslav]

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