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Inside the Droid 2? A lot of upgraded silicon

The Motorola-Verizon Droid 2 is a souped up version of the original Droid, thanks to some major chip improvements revealed in iFixit's teardown of the device.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
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Elpida supplies the 512MB DRAM memory module, twice that of the original Droid. That Qualcomm chip is the CDMA processor.
Elpida supplies the 512MB DRAM memory module, twice that of the original Droid. That Qualcomm chip is the CDMA processor. iFixit

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 prove how tightly linked RAM is to the processor, the TI OMAP 3630 chip is buried underneath the Elpida module, according to iFixit.

What else is inside? An 8GB flash memory module from SanDisk and more TI silicon. Namely, TI's power management and WLAN Bluetooth/FM chips--the latter a major upgrade from the original Droid.

With all of this TI silicon--and critical silicon, at that--inside, you would think that Motorola might have something to say about it. But you won't find a peep about TI on Motorola's Droid 2 tech specs page. Why? One can only speculate. Motorola may want to protect its brand. Another reason: smartphones are not PCs, which are usually adorned by Intel and Microsoft stickers competing with the PC maker for brand recognition. "We do not disclose the specifics on the series," a Motorola representative said.

Nevertheless, a lot of the new goodness inside the Droid 2 is directly attributable to upgraded silicon. I guess that's what teardown sites are for.