

That said, some smart phones won’t use a flex circuit to connect two boards. The small board at the bottom contains a vibration motor, the microphone, connections for the speaker phone, a USB interface, and part of the antenna. The board in the top of the phone contains most of the electronics. They connect to each other through a flex circuit. There are two circuit boards, one in the top of the phone, the other in the bottom. Still, the electronics on this phone lay out pretty much the way they do on other smart phones. And being able to put the two processors in one package is probably part of the reason Blu Products could get the cost of the phone down. That chip is what’s called a system-on-chip and it does contain two processors, a quad-core ARM device for phone functions, and a graphics processing unit for the rest of it. The two processors had a thin communication interface and operated independently of each other.īut the R1 HD we examined has only one processor chip which obviously handles both PDA and phone functions. The architecture was as though a PDA, or a personal digital assistant, had been combined with an old-fashioned feature phone. The other would run the user interface and applications. One would handle the network protocol and the basic functions of a phone. It used to be that smart phones contained two separate CPUs. A lack of wireless charging seems to be part of the price you pay for a cheap smart phone, at least for now.īut once you’re in the phone, you can begin to see why the cost of smart phones has come down. But there are no facilities for wireless charging in the Blu phone. The back of the phone case comes off with the removal of a few super tiny torx screws.
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And the battery has only one connection to the PCB so it detaches easily.
#How to take out blu r1 hd battery plus
The exterior back of the phone comes off readily, a plus if the phone’s lithium battery ever needs replacement. With the Blu’s front and back cameras next to each other, it’s easy to see that the selfie camera is shallower than the main camera, meaning it just doesn’t have the same quality of internals. The front camera, left, occupies about twice the volume of the selfie camera, right.Ī rule of thumb about cameras is that the deeper the camera body, the better the picture it takes simply because cameras with more depth to them have more room for optical components. That makes sense in that the Blu camera has only two-thirds as much resolution as those on higher end phones. But reports in the press we’ve seen say the front camera isn’t as good as that on higher end phones. We didn’t try using the phone because we would have had to add a sim card and sign up with a wireless carrier to make use of its features. So the quality of the images isn’t as good on the Blu.
#How to take out blu r1 hd battery upgrade
But owners can upgrade the Blu to the same amount of memory and storage as the iPhone for only about ten dollars or so.īoth phones have a five-megapixel camera for selfies but the iPhone has a 12-megapixel camera in front compared to an eight-megapixel front camera for the Blu. The iPhone has twice as much RAM, 2 Gb compared to 1 Gb in the Blu, and 16 Gb of storage compared to 8 Gb in the Blu. Meanwhile the iPhone uses a 1.85 GHz dual-core processor of Apple’s design. The Blu phone uses a 1.3 GHz quad-core processor from Mediatek in Taiwan. Some of the more notable differences are the processors, memory, and cameras.

It is interesting to make a few basic comparisons with the iPhone 6S. With high-end phones like the iPhone going for somewhere north of $600, you might wonder what you get in a phone selling for less than one-sixth that amount. The media splash arose because Amazon Prime members could get the phone for as little as $50 if they were willing to put up with seeing ads on the phone’s lock screen. The online retailer Amazon made headlines when it introduced a super-inexpensive smart phone from Blu Products in Miami called the R1 HD.
