BlackBerry Storm's clickable screen (and the rest of it) dissected, exposed

So you've read our extensive BlackBerry Storm review and, despite feeling disappointment about it not living up to the hype, can't help but wonder just what makes the thing tick click. While we were a bit too squeamish to rip one of ours apart and find out, phoneWreck felt no qualms about turning this week's hottest handset into a pile of bits, exposing (among numerous other things) the Qualcomm MSM7600 processor that's blamed for the phone's sluggish performance. As to how the clicky screen works, it's rather simple: just a plate behind the display (pictured above) with a dimple to push a button on a circuit board. Never dissect your heroes, kids; it just takes the mystery out of life.

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 23rd 2008 4:59AM]

so iphone was perfect right out of the box? oh ok thanks for clearing that up for us all!

[dr steve brule Posted Nov 23rd 2008 12:37AM]

im wondering if the gsm version will include wifi, anyone know?

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 23rd 2008 3:32AM]

I hope that if this is indeed pre-release software, that we get an update soon! For one, the accelerometer on the phone really takes a while before it switches from landscape to portrait and vice versa most of the time. I have had my phone crash 2-3 times already within just 24 hours :( good thing is the times it happened, I wasn't doing anything with the phone. It was sitting on the counter and I saw the screen go white.

Damn the hard resets take a long time to reboot. After all that said, I still love the phone. Looking forward to updates!!

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 23rd 2008 3:44AM]

correct me if im wrong but it looks like the camera is on the top left inder the screen.
wtf is it doing there and it looks like a really big screw hole for a mobile phone if it is that

[Carniphage Posted Nov 25th 2008 10:40AM]

So let me get this right. every key press from every text and every email all is handled by the same single button.
That dimple will need to deform and pop back for each press.
So in general use it will get 20-30 times the use of a regular Blackberry button.

That means it will need to be 20-30 times more reliable.

I think this may be a design flaw.

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 25th 2008 5:28PM]

It's not just a CPU. The qualcomm chipset contains 2 CPUs. A 400MHz ARM11 and a 240MHz ARM9. It has a DSP and video and audio codecs in hardware to implement MPEG4 decoding and ENCODING! It has a good 3D graphics processor (4 million polygons per second) and an imageprocessor (for the codecs.....audio too).

All in all, pretty much all the functionality of the beast is in this chipset. Of course a lot depends on how they implement it. If they only use part of the chipset, they may not have the second CPU. It's also designed for java accelleration. The speed depends a lot on whether Blackberry uses the device with the software provided or trys to shoehorn their other blackberry apps and OS into the device. The latter would result in a much poorer performance.

For those interested, the datasheet for the MSM7600 is here:
http://www.datasheetpro.com/268121_download_MSM7600_datasheet.html

As for those comments about the single button. I'm sure it was designed with this in mind (that it is going to be used 100 times more than a keypad). However, I agree, it could be a single point of failure that would be annoying.

-me

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 25th 2008 5:30PM]

I just discovered that this is the SAME chip as the IPHONE!!!!!!
-me