ifixit

How-to 2.0: Nerf gun battles get an instruction manual

Digital self-publishing is evolving rapidly but instruction manuals have been left behind. Ask any parent who has had to assemble childrens' items and you'll likely get an earful. It's about time a company attacked this mess. So here is Dozuki, which is turning its digital-manual power to the people.

Dozuki launched today, making it possible for individuals, manufacturers, and even factories to help others fix things. The startup's goal is to hold people's hands through the process of creating how-to manuals. This is for the gal who knows how to fix rare motorcycles or the manufacturer … Read more

ScrewMats make for easy DIY iPhone repairs

Most of the editors here won't hesitate to crack open their electronics, and that can probably be said for a lot of our readers, too. However, if you're timid about loosening the screws on your iPhone to do a repair (and understandably so), a ScrewMat might give you the confidence you need.

Available for the iPhone 3G/3GS and both CDMA and GSM versions of the iPhone 4, the plastic mat is magnetic so you can keep all your screws and other small iPhone parts organized for easy reassembly.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the top of the mat features an illustrated guide for finding all the impossibly small screws that hold things together. It tells you the stuff not to touch, too.

The mats will set you back $19.99 each through iFixit.com, so you can pick up a mat and your replacement parts in one order. Or you can pick up all three from the manufacturer for $49.99 and start your own repair service. … Read more

Revamped headphone jack may prevent iPad 2 moisture

Kevin Fox, lead designer at Mozilla Labs is theorizing that the headphone jack on the Apple iPad 2 might just be waterproof.

Based on the iPad 2 teardown graphics sourced on the crowdsource repair manual site iFixIt, he speculates that the new headphone jack is the materialization of a patent Apple submitted back in September 2010 that uses smaller pogo pins instead of the traditional metal strips.

The springy pogo plug design reduces the real estate required around the hardware, and also exposes the outermost plug ring when fully inserted into the jack--not a big deal, since the "ground ring" is simply used to remove charge and pause device playback when you remove it from the connector.

Interestingly enough, Fox also speculates that its steep-angled curve within the iPad 2 suggests a weatherproofing element to prevent moisture penetrating the device, and the subsequent lawsuits that can occur as a result.… Read more

Inside the Droid 2? A lot of upgraded silicon

Under the hood, the Motorola-Verizon Droid 2 is really a hopped-up version of the original Droid.

While practically a clone of the original Droid on the outside, the Droid 2 is not the same inside. As a previous post spelled out, underneath the skin beats a new Texas Instruments processor that is about twice as fast (based on the megahertz rating) of the original Droid 550MHz (Droid) versus 1,000MHz, i.e., 1GHz (Droid 2).

And as seen in the iFixit photo, Japan-based Elpida Memory supplies the 512MB DRAM module, twice the capacity of the original Droid. As if to … Read more

iFixit Manuals now free to the public

The website "iFixIt" has been a goldmine of information and how-to instructions for repairing various models of Macintosh that have been released over the years, starting with the "Pismo" PowerBook G3 in 2004. Their take-apart manuals have been filled with detailed photographs and illustrations that clearly show the steps for replacing parts, and accessing components for servicing. On December 15th, they licensed all of their repair manuals to the public for free.… Read more

Microsoft Zune HD: Under the hood

iFixt in short order has done a tear-down of the Microsoft Zune HD media player, which hit retail Tuesday.

The core silicon in the Zune HD is an Nvidia Tegra processor (see photo) based on the power-frugal ARM chip design. The system-on-chip uses less than 0.5 watts of power. Tegra's defining feature is the integrated Nvidia GeForce graphics chip, which gives the Zune its graphics processing oomph.

The Zune HD also uses a SiPORT HD radio chip and an SDRAM chip from Hynix, according to iFixit. The accelerometer, for automatically orienting the display between portrait and landscape modes, is from Kionix.

Probably the most conspicuous feature of the Microsoft media player is a 3.3 inch OLED display capacitive touch screen. OLED screens draw significantly less power than a traditional LCD. "This isn't the first product with an OLED, but it's certainly cutting-edge technology, and something we haven't seen in any Apple… Read more

What's inside the new Apple Shuffle?

CNET tends to review products from the outside looking in (see Donald Bell's full review of the new Shuffle). But the good folks over at iFixit make it habit to start right from the inside. In the case of the third-generation Shuffle teardown, like with all recent iPods, Apple doesn't make it easy to crack the case. And although only one screw had to be removed, iFixit describes how it had to insert a "metal spudger into a crevice between the rear cover and the rest of the Shuffle" to get the device open. As you might expect, things are pretty simple--and tiny--under the Shuffle's hood.

There are a couple more pictures after the jump, but the full dissection (with lots more photos) is available at iFixit, where one unsatisfied reader writes:

"Have you disassembled the headphones with remote yet? Have you figured out, how the buttons work? Do they work by connecting two lines with a resistor? Is it possible to add such a remote to other headphones?"

As always, feel free to comment.

(Source: iFixit via Gizmodo)

See more pics after the jump.… Read more

Kindle 2 gets naked

If you're looking for hot, sexy, revealing pics, then you know Crave is the place to be. Today we've got a treat for all you naughty boys and girls. OK, I really can't do the faux erotic thing (yes, that's what I was going for). I just feel too slimy.

Anyway, the total geeks (that is a huge compliment) over at ifixit have gutted the Amazon Kindle 2 to see what makes it tick.

Here are a few highlights from their findings:

According to the article, the Kindle 2 has a 532MHz 90nm ARM11-based Freescale MCIMX31L … Read more

iPhone 3G innards revealed; battery not soldered in

It was bound to happen; the folks over at iFixit have gone ahead and taken apart the iPhone 3G that they waited so long in line for in the cold wintry air of New Zealand.

They took apart the iPhone 3G piece by piece, layer by layer, right down to the logic board, and you can take a look at all the gory details over on their site. One of the more interesting things they discovered is that unlike that of the original iPhone, the battery in the iPhone 3G is not soldered on to the logic board, which means … Read more