iPad 2 : Torn down, jailbroken and benchmarked!

No other company’s gadgets receive a royal treatment and a riotous treatment all on the same day. Apple’s product has this dubious distinction. People gather around various sales points withering the blistering cold to grab their gadget. Some even pay $900 for a spot to get into the shop first. After the first few hours sales, someone elsewhere will break it down to pieces and someone else will break the software. All of this happens in the first six hours of the product launch. These things can only happen for a device which can sell 1 million units over the weekend.

iPad 2 is broken down to pieces by iFixit, jailbroken by Comex and benchmarked by AnandTech.

Tear down

The cost of iPad 2 with 32 GB memory will cost $324 to Apple. That’s just the cost to Apple and there are all kinds of cost which Apple bears like software, shipping, assembling and so on. So Apple isn’t ripping off people but is making modest profits which makes it the most valuable tech company of America.

AT&T version is costlier than Verizon version as expensive chips are were used in the AT&T version. Qualcomm supplied the wireless chip for Verizon and Infineon provided it for the AT&T version. Much touted 1 GHz A5 dual-core processor with a 200MHz bus is manufactured by Samsung and 512 MB  RAM is Samsung manufactured. Other components are made by Toshiba, Texas Instruments, ST Micro and Broadcom. A lot of glue was used to hold some of the parts together.

iPad 2 which gets its massive 10 hour battery life from three massive Li-Ion cells. iFixit has given a rating of 4 for reparability, which translates to quite difficult to repair.

Jailbreak

This is by now very famous is almost given for any mobile device from Apple. The tie-up with Apple for syncing and the curfew on installing itunes-only apps doesn’t go down with the hacker community. What do they do? They jailbreak it, install all kinds of apps and for some part they even install an OS like Android. That honors are complete for iPad 2.

Comex has run Cydia – an app to access non-itunes appstore – on iPad 2. iPad 2 is jailbroken but the code isn’t out yet for the general populace. It’s only a matter of time before everyone else get access to it.

Benchmark

The benchmarking is done by comparing Apples with Motorolas. Motorola Xoom was pitted against iPad 2 – which is the decent competition to iPad 2.  iPad 2 fared quite well on its processing speeds though the 1 GHz processing speed is never reached. The tablet is overclocked at 900 MHz. Yet quite decent in its performance. There are other benchmark test which AnandTech has done by comparing with Motorola Xoom and older iPad.

The A5 chip is powered by ARM Cortex A9 CPU and PowerVR SGX 543MP2 GPU. In the Javascript tests iPad 2 fared better than iPad and Xoom In the GPU tests, there is no competition to iPad 2.

What iPad 2 provides is a better and faster user experience which leaves Motorola Xoom far behind. Irony is Motorola Xoom is the best Android tablet out there and the next best Android tablet is quite far away. Honestly we don’t know where it will come from.

Will the non-Android tablets ever catch up with iPad?