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Those wonderful gadgetological vivisectionists over at iFixIt have once again unsheathed their phillips head screwdrivers, polished their pliers and unraveled the mysteries of the torx with this week’s gadget du jour: the Nintendo 3DS. Let’s take a look at what they found once the 3DS’ guts were spilled across the table.
Describing the Nintendo 3DS as “the most camera-laden device we’ve ever taken apart,” the iFixIt guys found three cameras inside, which, if you studied math, you’ll quickly realize is one whole camera sensor for each dimension. But what about that fancy glasses-free 3D?
iFixIt explains the technology well, noting that a parallax barrier layer in the top LCD responds to adjustments made with the 3D slider and slightly changes the image between each of the viewer’s eyes accordingly.
What about the silicon? Here’s what iFixIt found inside: a Nintendo 1048 0H ARM CPU; Fujitsu MB82M8080-07L; Toshiba THGBM2G3P1FBAI8 NAND Flash; Texas Instruments PAIC3010B 0AA37DW and Invensense ITG-3270 MEMS Gyroscope.
So far, so good, but here’s where things get really disappointing: battery life. Battery life on the 3DS is abysmal for a portable handheld. With each charge, you’ll only get between 3 to 5 hours of 3D gaming, due in part — iFixIt reckons — to the faster processors and dual LCD layers for the parallax screen, necessitating drawing each frame twice. If you plan on just loading up classic DS games on your 3DS, the battery does more respectably, giving up to eight hours of playtime per three and a half hour charge, but no matter how you cut it, the 3DS seems disappointing when it comes to juice.
As usual, there’s more. For some of the finer strokes, head on over to iFixIt and read the whole thing.
