The Kindle 3’s circuit board was designed with all of its components on one side, which means it’s easy to manufacture: You only have to solder one side of the board, rather than two sides typical for many other electronic devices. This cuts down on production time and lets Amazon really churn these readers out.
Stuck to the inside back of the Kindle’s case is an RFID chip. Why put a radio frequency tracking device on a Kindle? Most likely Amazon has it for inventory and shipping tracking purposes, so that both you and the Seattle retailer can keep tabs on the location of your e-reader while it’s being delivered to your hot little hands.
Why is there exposed copper around the audio chipsets? One guess is that an early design iteration had a shielding box around the audio chips, but that in later models the shield was nixed but the circuit board wasn’t updated.
While this wasn’t so much a teardown as a guided tour of the Kindle 3’s circuit board, you can watch the full process of taking apart the Kindle over at EEVblog, complete with a very enthusiastic narrator. What else did you find interesting about the guts of the Kindle 3? Let us know in the comments!
[EEVblog via Hack a Day]
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Kindle Keyboard (Wi-Fi/3G, 3rd Generation)
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