EE Times Under The Hood - October 8, 2007 - (Page 32) under the hood: MOBILE www.eetimes.com • www.techonline.com Full-featured phones are ultrathin BY JEFF BROWN R ecent teardowns by Portelligent—most notably the 10-mm-thick UMTS Sony Ericsson W880i—reveal a trimming of the display module waistline to enable a class of highly functional, ultrathin candy-bar cell phones. We go under the glassy surface of the 46-mm-diagonal QVGA LCD found in the W880i to highlight some of the methods used to achieve an overall LCD module thickness of just 1.6 mm. QVGA (320 x 240-pixel) display module contained in the W880i. Examining the two display modules side by side quickly reveals that the LCD module in the W880i contributes at least 1 mm of the 7.6-mm profile difference between the phones. Where is the glass? When squeezing out an additional 1 mm from a 2.6-mm-thick display assembly, typically the first component to address would be the glass. At 0.42 mm thick, the glass found in Thick and thinner When the one-year-old Sony Ericsson K800i, also analyzed by Portelligent, is compared with the recently launched W880i, many similarities are found to exist between the phones, including the candy-bar form factor, QVGA display, dual cameras and W-CDMA connectivity. However, the thickness of the devices and their respective display modules couldn’ t be more different. At only 10 mm, the Sony Ericsson W880i is more than 40 percent thinner than the K800i, even after excluding the additional 5-mm camera protrusion found on the K800i. A significant contributor to this reduction in thickness is the svelte 32 Electronic Engineering Times, TechOnline | October 8, 2007 http://www.eetimes.com http://www.techonline.com
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