The e757 smart phone from TCL contributes to the growing body of evidence proclaiming China's arrival in the handset industry. In a field characterized by rapid change and increasing product sophistication, TCL and its cell phone competitors in China have mounted a serious response to the entrenched and incumbent players, with the group supplying more than half of the domestic Chinese market.
While they lack the global reach of the top producers for now, Chinese handset manufacturers are affecting the balance of power. Should China increase its exports of handsets, it could provide one of the more compelling twists to the evolving cell phone business.
Consider how Guangdong-based TCL approached the design of a data-centric handset for the Asian market. Aimed at the wireless power user, the e757 is TCL's first smart phone, which launched after a reported three-year development period.
The PDA-like phone features a touch-sensitive 176 x 220-pixel, 65,000-color thin-film diode (TFD) display, a portion of which is visible through a narrow window when the clamshell cover is closed. Based on a dual-band GSM900 and DCS1800 platform, the phone supports GPRS Class 10 and China Mobile's Monternet Smartphone Portal, an Internet service for small-screen portables. The handset operates as a normal PDA without the SIM card, uses USB for interfacing with a PC and recognizes handwriting in both Chinese characters and the English alphabet.
The design is based on a Freescale DragonBall system processor, the MC68SZ328, which performs the PDA functionality and is responsible for the touchscreen, display and radio modem interface. The CPU is supported by a 4-Mbyte NOR flash from STMicroelectronics (the M29W320DT), along with 2 Mbytes of SRAM (the K6F1616U6) and 16 Mbytes of NAND flash (K9F2808UOC) from Samsung.
Yamaha's FM sound synthesizer family surfaces in the e757 design via the YMU-762, and a Philips ISP1106 USB transceiver chip supports external connectivity. While there are the usual set of small-scale power-management devices and a smattering of glue-logic gates, the core design is essentially a highly integrated PDA architecture, reminiscent of many of the earlier Palm products.
Rather than get bogged down in radio development-and presumably to get the end product to market quickly-TCL opted for a precooked cellular engine from Wavecom. The Wismo Quik (W2D10-V40) module mounts to the e757's main board and provides the cellular radio electronics, with components that include a Philips ARM core-powered baseband processor (the VP40584B), a transceiver, synthesizer and baseband interface chip set from Silicon Labs (the Si4200, Si4133 and Si4201, respectively), and a CX77304 power-amplifier module from Skyworks. A multichip package from STMicroelectronics, the M36W216TI, houses 2 Mbytes of NOR flash and 256 kbytes of SRAM for use in the Wavecom radio module.
Partitioning minimizes the thickness of a design requiring two distinct circuit board assemblies. The side of the main board that supports the Wavecom daughtercard is left largely unpopulated in its interior, with taller components such as external connectors and user interface controls mounted at the board's periphery. Thus, with the Wavecom assembly plugged in and occupying the board's interior, the radio module height is nested within the high-profile components at the board's edge. The LCD and touchscreen assembly form the top layer of the assembly sandwich, with a flex connector plugging into a zero-insertion-force connector adjacent to the processor circuitry.
The estimated cost of goods sold (COGS) is roughly a third of the $360 street price paid for the e757. Some of the COGS is tied to Wavecom's markup of the GSM/GPRS module.
Industrial design for the e757 appears to borrow heavily from Motorola designs. That begs the question of whether it will matter how much innovation Chinese handset vendors bring to the market. If handset functionality becomes more stable, consumers may chase price over brand and originality. In that environment, the lower-cost structures of Chinese handset producers could loom large.
David Carey, president of Portelligent (www.teardown.com), a producer of teardown reports and related industry research on wireless, mobile and personal electronics.
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In Brief
The e757 data-centric handset from TCL illustrates the increasing sophistication of Chinese cell phone manufacturers-and the threat they pose to incumbents. It uses Motorola's Dragonball processor with 4 Mbytes of NOR flash, 2 Mbytes of SRAM and 16 Mbytes of NAND, along with FM sound from Yamaha. To avoid the trials of radio design, TCL uses a Wavecom Wismo Quik module. The radio daughtercard occupies the full side of the main board. Taller components are mounted on the periphery. The cost is $360. TCL borrowed much from Motorola's smart-phone designs, so the level of Chinese innovation is questionable-but does it matter, given the low cost?
