Ah, smartphones. Most of us have at least one of these devices. We use them for all kinds of tasks during everyday use. Banking and contactless payments, keeping in touch with friends and loved ones. Catching up on the latest news and social media feeds. Playing games, listening to music and watching TV shows and movies on the go. Unfortunately, they also suffer from manufacturers’ unrelenting drive for ever greater profits through rapid replacements.
So, hello once again to our readers and fellow fixers! Today, we explore the intricacies of modern smartphones by going through the process of designing and making a smartphone. For this reason, we can gain insights into how they design these devices around planned obsolescence. We’ll demonstrate how we would design and make our smartphone around resisting planned obsolescence.
Deep-diving inside smartphones…
This is a BQ Aquaris M5, a mid-range Android smartphone from 2015. Initially, it launched with Android 5.0 Lollipop out of the box, and received updates up to 7.1.2 Nougat. A Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 system-on-chip forms the heart of this phone; the SoC consists of two quad-core ARM A53 cores. One cluster serves as the performance cluster with a 1.5 GHz clock speed, while the other cluster forms the efficiency cluster with a clock speed of 1 GHz.
Particularly, my Aquaris M5 came with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of eMMC 4.5 internal storage. Although, BQ also released variants with 3GB of RAM and 16 or 32GB of internal storage. You can find full specifications for this device here and here.
Brief history of BQ
BQ made its start as a Spanish brand in 2009, under the name ‘Mundo Reader’. Initially, it imported e-book readers from Asia to then sell to consumers. But then the following year, it transitioned to producing devices under its own brand. BQ then gained some notability in 2015, when it released select Aquaris devices with Ubuntu Touch, instead of Android.
In 2018, Vietnamese conglomerate VinGroup acquired a controlling stake in BQ. After this, VinGroup’s division VinSmart gradually phased out the BQ brand, in favour of its ‘Vsmart’ brand for smartphones. This venture into smartphones and TVs was a short-lived endeavour, as VinGroup closed down the VinSmart unit in 2021.
BQ itself pulled out of the smartphone market by 2020, and subsequently ceased trading the following year. However, the BQ name lives on as a division of Educación y Robótica, S.L (Spanish for Education and Robotics). It specialises in developing robotics and tech products and solutions for the education sector in Spain.
Taking apart the smartphone
Back to the Aquaris M5, let’s take it apart! Surprisingly, it’s the only BQ phone with iFixit guides on how to perform repairs. However, we reckon we can learn more about the internals of smartphones by doing a teardown ourselves!
Firstly, we open up the back cover of the device. Thankfully, we only need to use a plastic spudger to open it up, as only clips hold the cover in place. No adhesive in use here, yay!
Open sesame! Oh, and don’t worry about the small nick on the black coating which likely forms part of heat dissipation. Before writing this article, I accidentally caught it when I opened it up as curiosity got the better of me, heh heh! Anyway, next I remove a number of screws which hold the plastic plate covering the mainboard in place, aaaaand…
…here we are! Afterwards, I remove the sim card and microSD trays, along with most of the other gubbins. Particularly the front and rear cameras, mainboard, speaker, antenna cable and battery. In the case of the battery, it looks A-OK here – no sign of it becoming a spicy pillow! Also, the mainboard has a dedicated microSD slot, in addition to two miniSIM slots. Quite a rarity nowadays, as manufacturers gradually exclude microSD card slots (as well as the headphone jack) from new devices.
So what next?
Now that we have some basic ideas of where each components go, it’s time to start making our smartphone! But before we do, we first need to draw up some ideas for what we want our smartphone to be. Do we want a pocket rocket with flagship specs in a small device, like an Apple iPhone 13 Mini or Sony’s Xperia Compact series devices? Or perhaps a TV-sized brick like most smartphones are nowadays? How about shooting for the middle ground with a balance between screen estate, battery life and pocketability?
Next time, we do a spot of specs-crafting, where we put together a list of specs and features for our smartphones. Like LoRa modules. Gareth really wants a LoRa module in our smartphones to set it apart from every other phone on the market! But will ours actually have it? Join us on our journey to design and make our very own smartphone. And as always, keep calm and just keep on fixing!