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Kindle Oasis Teardown Reveals Freescale CPU, Tiny Battery, But No Visible Wireless Chip

kindle oasis 2We still don’t know that the Kindle Oasis shipped with a Bluetooth chip, but the first teardown has offered hints that the case might be able to do more than just hold a change.

An eager hacker over at MobileRead has ripped open his Kindle Oasis, and revealed that it has a 245 mAh battery, runs on a Freescale CPU, and uses Samsung flash storage.

There’s no wireless chip visible, but based on the design of the Echo there will be a discrete wireless chip, and it will be on the backside of the board. So we’ll have to wait for a more complete teardown before we know which chip it is using.

They write:

Since I did not want to wait for somebody tearing down the Kindle Oasis anymore I decided to open up mine. The shell uses double sided tape to fix the cover to the back so one cannot take apart the Oasis too often without replacing it. otherwise the disassembly is fairly easy but be aware that the plastic noses that hold the cover attached towards the thicker part of the case are not really angled correctly for being detached damage-free too often.

No serial port pins seem to stand out but there are quite a few testpoints that have a voltage between 2.5v and 1.6v fitting an active serial pin.

I could figure out a few of the pins on the backcover connector. the left and rightmost pins are GND and case-ground and the second leftmost carries VBat the two remaining pins seem to be a i2c bus for the cover.

They also posted this photo of the Oasis innards. Do you see anything interesting?

kindle oasis

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Comments


Will O’Neil May 1, 2016 um 9:08 pm

Does seem to be designed to be repairable, which is to say not as dense as it possibly could be. It’s a little surprising in a way because Amazon’s model for Kindles seems to have been largely throwaway. It may simply be a residual of designing it for thorough debugging before going to rate production. Clearly highly integrated — no telling what’s integrated into the CPU chip. I don’t expect anyone will be taking the top off one to find out, or that is if they do they won’t be publishing the results.

Chris Meadows May 2, 2016 um 8:27 am

Not so much of a surprise that it’s designed to be repaired. Given how much it costs, it could actually be economical to repair it, whereas an $80 basic Kindle might cost more than it’s worth at technicians' hourly rates.


Kindle Oasis teardown reveals Freescale chip, Samsung memory, 245 mAh battery – TeleRead News: E-books, publishing, tech and beyond May 2, 2016 um 9:28 am

[…] The Digital Reader, Nate Hoffelder notes the lack of a visible wireless chip on the board. However, this doesn’t seem to mean much to me—the Oasis obviously has Wi-Fi, so it has to come […]


Frank May 2, 2016 um 10:57 am

It appears to have the same processor as the Voyage and the internals are pretty small.


BDR May 3, 2016 um 3:40 pm

Clever idea, Amazon had … salting the rumor-mill with hints of bluetooth while not actually stating it. Between that, their definition of an "Amazon" week (3.5 hours) and their (carefully worded) Oasis battery statements, they could start their own B-School for sleazy marketing managers.


GothLugh May 8, 2016 um 10:44 am

Where are UART pins?


FCC Paperwork Confirms Kindle Oasis Has Bluetooth, But No Headphone Jack | The Digital Reader October 16, 2016 um 1:58 pm

[…] The two sets of paperwork (one for the 3G unit, the other for the Wifi-only unit) show basically the same device. It's a lopsided ereader with a small battery, with all the electronics along the one edge. Of course, we knew most of that thanks to the Kindle Oasis owner who opened his unit and took photos. […]


CMC May 27, 2017 um 8:37 pm

Bluetooth antenna jack.


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