iriver Lplayer teardown
Overall thoughts:
- This is a very small, neat, lightweight player.
- Battery life could be better
- Audio quality (specifically noise floor) could be better
- Tactile interface is great
- Being able to just copy MP3s to it like a drive is awesome
- It's just so... tiny. And it plays videos.
- UI responsiveness improves with 1.03 firmware, and you get a lot less crashes with funny characters in your filesystem
- Much more solid-feeling than the Clix 2
Time to see what makes it tick.
The case is held together with clips along the edges. I pushed and twisted and poked trying to make it spring apart like the previous Clix, but it's a lot simpler now. Stick a fingernail into the edge with the power/volume buttons and lever the base outwards, away from the screen.
Beginning to separate the halves
Separated a little further. Note the LCD cable, which is still connected.
Don't separate the halves yet. The LCD cable is still attached. Pop it off with a flat-bladed screwdriver.
Lplayer split into two halves
The mainboard can be pried out. I recommend working from the side away from the USB port. Again, don't separate the bottom case and the mainboard; the battery is still attached. This has no connector and the wires are very thin, so be careful.
Back of the mainboard
We have:
- K4S641632K: Samsung 8MB SDRAM
- : Samsung 8GB NAND Flash
- 500mAh li-poly cell
- V24230: power amp in TSSOP module?
Front of the mainboard
On the front, with the tape/shield removed:
- Presumably, the main CPU: iriver2135. This is the same chip used on the iriver E100.
- 24MHz crystal
and not much else of interest.
Note the screw holding down the headphone jack. This is a Good Thing. Most small/cheap players just solder the jack onto the PCB. Eventually, those solder joints will crack and break. The screw should add quite a bit of long-term robustness.
More metal clips holding the screen together
The screen assembly is held together with more metal clips (it's solidly assembled, if nothing else). They're in the positions that are not covered by the main clips.
The screen assembly... disassembled
I'm not sure why the LCD cover is so dark. Perhaps it's to prevent people seeing inside the case, reasoning that the LCD was bright enough already. It's not polarized. You can also see that the size of the device is entirely determined by the outline of that LCD display. I think the logic boards could be made smaller. This is pretty much the smallest device you can build with the chosen LCD.
Reassembling the thing is a little fiddly. Lever the mainboard back into the case, USB-port first, making sure to line up the power/volume buttons and the lock switch. To reconnect the LCD cable you can probably get away with just lining up the connectors and squeezing the halves together, but I got a more reliable connection by sticking my finger in to properly seat the cable before clipping the halves together.
Reattaching the LCD cable
You'll need to restart the player to bring the LCD display back to normal.