Cracking Open: Motorola Droid Razr

Thin and stylish the original Razr flip phone was a huge success. And, Motorola hopes the first Razr smartphone will also be a hit. I'm Bill Detwiler Head Technology Editor at TechRepublic and I'm going to crack open the Motorola Droid Razr. To open the Droid Razr, I used a thin metal blade to pop loose the back cover and gently pry it away from the battery. Once inside the phone, I removed the battery contact screws and the battery itself. I then removed the screws that hold the outer case to the display assembly, including one hidden near the rear camera. Next, I removed the Razr's internal metal frame, the front camera, the headphone jack bracket, the rear camera, and several EMI shields from the motherboard. Unfortunately, this is were our teardown ended. The Droid Razr's motherboard is held to the display assembly with strong adhesive, and most of the EMI shields are soldered to the motherboard. As I wanted to reassemble the Razr in working order, I decided against forcing loose the motherboard or desoldering the EMI shields. Luckily, our friends over at iFixit did remove the EMI shields, so we have a full accounting of the Razr's microchips. So what have we learned about the Motorola Droid Razr from our teardown, well... The phone is basically and upgraded Droid Bionic. Both phones have Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 processors and one gig of RAM. Both use the same Motorola LTE baseband processor and Qualcomm MDM6600 modem.  They have the same Texas Instruments' Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS chip. And, both phones use the ATMEL MXT224 touchscreen controller.The Razr however, has a 1.2GHz processor compared to the Bionic's 1GHz chip. Its front-facing camera is better. The battery has slightly more capacity. The Razr has a Super AMOLED display. And, it's thinner and lighter than the Bionic. The Bionic does have user-replaceable battery, but that its only advantage. Given that the Razr is basically a better Bionic, you might wonder why Sony would released the two so close together. Well, Motorola originally planned to release the Bionic "around Q2", but there was some concern about the phone's performance. So, they pushed the launch back several months, and upgraded the final version's hardware. As they likely didn't want to also delay the Razr's launch, they were forced to release the newer, better phone just two short months later. If you bought a Bionic and now have Razr envy, I don't blame you. The Razr is just more phone for the money. For TechRepublic, I'm Bill Detwiler and this has been a Cracking Open of the Motorola Droid Razr.