Several of high-tech’s largest players are hoping the new Palm Pre will be a raving success.
Surprising design choices give Palm Pre a potential market advantage
These firms – Texas Instruments, Sony, Samsung, Qualcomm, Elpida and Cypress Semiconductor – are major suppliers of components to the new smart phone, according to a teardown of the product.
The dissection by iSuppli uncovered a number of surprising design choices that offer the Pre a potential advantage over Apple’s iPhone – as well as higher costs.
For instance, the Pre uses an advanced polysilicon LCD display from Sony that produces higher resolution and faster response times than conventional LCDs. But the screen comes with a higher price: $21, as estimated by iSuppli.
The phone also uses 2 gigabits of SDRAM memory capacity, twice as much as the iPhone 3G. Suppliers of the chips include Elpida, the market’s number two SDRAM manufacturer.
Also in the Palm Pre is a premium choice of flash memory from Samsung, though Palm could use other suppliers as well. The eMMC MoviNAND flash from Samsung offers higher performance. It also costs more: about $17 a phone.
ISuppli’s teardown found a baseband processor from Qualcomm, an applications processor from Texas Instruments and a touch-screen controller from Cypress Semiconductor.
All will be routing for the phone’s success.
