Zanco Tiny T1 Teardown

ID: 117613

Description: We’ve seen (and torn down) pretty much...

For size reference, we've enlisted the help of a certain furry rebel. Don't worry—we'll transport him back to the Rebellion when we're done with him.
While it's not the most popular tiny phone form factor, the T1's chocolate bar layout makes dialing and texting with human-sized fingers a breeze.
The metal back case is smooth except for a regulatory sticker and speaker grille. No fragile glass panel to shatter. No unsightly rear camera bump.

A "micro"-USB port occupies the bottom of the phone—and Zanco has managed to squeeze in a pinhole microphone alongside it.
Nano is such a relative word, as the "nano" SIM slot dominates the right edge of the phone.
If you're prone to butt-dialing people, the Tiny T1 is not for you.
Does size matter? We compare the Tiny T1 to its modern compatriots: a tech writer's LG ENV3 and a Samsung Galaxy S9+.

Opening a phone of this scale requires specialty tools. Fortunately, iFixit has got it covered.
Despite its retro aesthetic, this opening procedure is far from obsolete. Some micro spudger action frees up the front clips, and the top plastic plate is free!
Unlike with some phones, we encounter no proprietary screws here.
We move the keypad aside and find the button pad soldered to the board beneath.
To supply backlight to the keypad, two white adhesive pads diffuse light from four surface-mounted LEDs underneath.

While most modern phones are held together by an army of screws and nasty adhesives, the Tiny T1 has none of that. Zero screws! Zero adhesives!
The entire innards pop out with a single pry with a (normal) sized spudger.
The likely lesson here: to easily open normal-sized phones, we need a giant spudger.
Who says small can't be repairable? (Looking at you, AirPods.)

Here we have the inner workings of the Tiny T1—all of them. It's just one board, with (nearly) everything soldered to it:
Speaker
Microphone capsule
High tech Bluetooth antenna (it's a wire)
"Nano" SIM slot, ironically hogging nearly half the board
Two mysterious pogo pins, which are accessible from outside—possibly for charging? Accessory port? A tiny taser?
200 mAh 0.74 Wh battery (for comparison, the ENV3 has 3.5 Wh, while the Galaxy S9+ weighs in at 13.48 Wh)
While the S9+ battery packs over eighteen times the capacity, we doubt that its standby scales linearly to the Tiny T1's three-day rating.

What's the bare minimum amount of silicon needed for a functioning mobile phone? We're not sure, but this can't be far off:
Mediatek MT6261DA SoC
RDA Microelectronics RDA6625 Front-end module
Likely li-ion battery charger ic
26 MHz oscillator

That's a wrap to this Tiny Teardown!
The T1 shows you can make a working phone with just a little hardware—and with technological advancements, you can make it that much little-er.
We've come a long way from the first mobile phones of over forty years ago, even surpassing the wildest concepts from spy films and science fiction.
... Which just means that modern designers of fictional gadgets have to keep upping their game.

The Tiny T1 earns a 5 out of 10 on our repairability scale (10 is the easiest to repair):
The phone is held together by clips alone, making the opening procedure easy and painless.
The front plastic plate, which is prone to cracking, is easily replaceable.
Most components, including the battery, are soldered to the motherboard, making repairs difficult.

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