Phone 7 HTC Revealed As A Nexus One Make-Over

When the team at repair site iFixit decided to tear down the HTC Surround, they thought they were doing “something completely different”. What they found, they said, was a whole lot of Nexus One déjà vu.

HTC made the Nexus One smartphone for Google and, seemingly, was so pleased with its handiwork it decided to repeat it.

“Five of the major chip packages on the Surround’s motherboard are identical to the Nexus One, and the sixth (Samsung NAND + SDRAM) appears to be just a revised chip found in Uncle Nexus,” Miroslav Djuric, iFixit’s director of technical communication, wrote in a press note.

A Talk Down Memory Lane

Calling it a “very solid, capable phone that will undoubtedly please its users”, Djuric nonetheless added, “Still, we’re a bit underwhelmed that HTC chose to put year-old hardware in it, especially since dual-core phones are coming right around the corner.”

But maybe iFixit’s most fun discovery of all – “and they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for us meddling kids!”, joked Djuric – was that the Surround’s “internal storage” is actually a 16GB SanDisk microSDHC card hidden behind some silver foil and two “VOID” stickers warning that this is warranty-breaking territory.

Still, once there, the team wrote on its site, “It definitely seems possible that you could easily swap the card out for a higher-capacity microSDHC”.

Android To Phone 7 Migration

The HTC Surround was among the five smartphones that Microsoft, amid much media hubbub, introduced with its Windows Phone 7 operating system in the US. Exclusive to the AT&T network, the Surround is billed by HTC as the “ultimate multimedia device”. It features a slide-out speaker wall, integrated kickstand, a customisable equaliser, Dolby Mobile and the sound driver SRS WOW HD, for a serious audio and video experience.

iFixit also found that Surround uses two microphones, in conjunction with an Audience A1026 voice processor, to cancel out background noise during phone calls — just like the Nexus One.

And again harkening back to the original Google phone, iFixit found that the Surround’s motherboard interconnect cable is “sandwiched between the many layers of the upper motherboard”, a design that requires less space for connectors and sockets, and that the motherboards are attached with “a large ribbon cable spanning the gap between them”.

Included on the motherboard are a Qualcomm multi-band UMTS/EGPRS transceiver integrated with GPS; a 1GHz Snapdragon processor; 5MB of NAND Flash and 512MB of SDRAM memory from Samsung; a Skyworks power amplifier; and Qualcomm ICs for power management. All of this, says iFixit, is identical to, or newer versions of, chips found on the Nexus One.

Heavy Duty Sliding Grille

Other details of note that the team came across are that the slider mechanism on the phone’s speaker grille is downright hefty, so should keep doing its job for years to come. And that metal plates with “strategically placed holes” are soldered to the front of the phone’s two speakers to enhance their quality, by directing sound out of the speaker grille instead of into the phone.

In all, the team gave the Surround a “repairability” score of 5 out of 10.

“It’s relatively easy to remove the rear case to replace the battery but that’s where the fun stops,” wrote Djuric. “You’ll have to void your warranty to take anything else out, and it’s very difficult to access the front panel and LCD if you’d like to replace it.”

In past teardowns, the more repair-friendly Nokia N8 smartphone and Dell Streak tablet earned scores of 8 out of 10, while the Apple MacBook Air – which, from the first proprietary screw on the exterior of the notebook, discouraged any peeking around or easy repairs – was given a 4 out of 10.