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Inside the Kindle Touch

Amazon’s new 6″ ereader will be shipping tomorrow, and when amazon announced that today it reminded me of something.

Right before the Kindle Fire launch event I was handed a tip on some FCC paperwork for 3 devices that turned out to be the new Kindles. At the time, all the interesting stuff was hidden by embargoes. Amazon asked the FCC to conceal just about everything: photos, diagrams, user manual, and everything else that would have told us what we were looking at.

But now I can show you something.

I hadn’t looked at the paperwork since that day, so today I checked back to see if any of the embargos had expired. One of the embargoes expired the day after the press conference, but the other 2 won’t expire until December and March. I’m pretty sure that the other 2 are the K4 and the Kindle Fire, but I won’t know for sure until I can actually see them.

Now, Amazon may still hiding the interesting stuff for 2 of their 3 devices, but photos for the Kindle Touch are now available. Ladies and gentleman, I present to you the Kindle Touch.

As you can see from the photo, the the Kindle Touch has an interior that looks very different from the K4, which I posted some time back.  The black rectangle is the battery, and you can probably guess that this is the 3G model because the SIM card sticks out like a sore thumb. I’d like to go on and tell you about the internal chips, but I can’t. None of the chips on the FCC test model have any markings. They’re all blank!

I have to admit that this is a first. I’ve usually had to decipher the serial numbers and model numbers, but I’ve never seen chips that had no markings.

When I last told you about these Kindles hitting the FCC, I pointed out that Amazon likes to keep secrets. Today I can show you that they’ve taken it to a new level. While I’m pretty sure that the Kindle Touch will be disassembled fairly soon, I’m not sure that the chips inside the shipped devices will be labeled either.

But I’m looking forward to find out.

kindle touch external

kindle touch internal

FCC

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Comments


Inside the Kindle Fire – The Digital Reader November 15, 2011 um 5:19 pm

[…] yesterday I posted the FCC teardown for the Kindle Touch. No real surprises there […]


Rob November 15, 2011 um 6:16 pm

Looks more like someone ran the internal pictures through Photoshop before submitting them to the FCC as an additional security measure. Coming from a background in cell phone design, I can guarantee you that the ICs in the shipping product will be labeled, primarily for quality control purposes. You want to make sure the right part was shipped by the supplier, that a technician put the right part reel on the pick-and-place machine, and that the machine correctly oriented the part and put it down at the right place on the circuit board. There’s also usually a production date and lot code on complex ICs and electronics modules for back-tracking bad batches with latent failures that escape testing and don’t go bad until they’ve been in use for a while ("infant mortality").

Nate Hoffelder November 15, 2011 um 7:55 pm

That would make more sense, but it’s also more than a little paranoid (of Amazon).


Como é o interior de um Kindle Touch? | eBook Portugal November 22, 2011 um 11:43 am

[…] The Digital Reader Share and […]


What's inside Kindle Touch [picture] | Ebook Friendly July 5, 2012 um 11:07 am

[…] Kindle Touch started to ship ahead of schedule and Nate Hoffelder from The Digital Reader blog has already dismantled one piece. […]


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