Huawei Vodafone 736 Mobile Phone Teardown

Overview / Main Features

The Vodafone 736 is an entry level single-band 3G (UMTS) slider handset made by Huawei. It features a color 2 inch primary screen with a 2MP camera, Bluetooth connectivity, FM radio and memory expansion via microSD. According to Vodafone press release:

"The [Vodafone 736] is a compact, affordable and stylish slider mobile with a 2 inch colour display suitable for email and mobile internet, and comes complete with Google Maps, Vodafone Music and Vodafone Messenger.

The Huawei Vodafone 736 is also quad-band GSM/EDGE capable handset and is designed specifically for Vodafone's Pay-As-You-Go Prepaid mobile phone service.

Huawei Vodafone 736 Mobile Phone Main Image

Vodafone Pre-paid customers

Released

Per press releases, the handset was first announced during 3GSM on Feb. 16th, 2009 and will be available in the spring of 2009.

Huawei Vodafone 736 Mobile Phone - Main PCB Top

Pricing - At the time of writing (Feb. 2009), Vodafone has not yet released pricing information for this new device.

Availability - Vodafone Pay-Go service areas mainly within Europe.

Volume Estimations

For the purposes of this teardown analysis, we have assumed a lifetime production volume of 2M units.

As a reminder, teardown volume production assumptions are primarily used for our cost analysis in terms of amortized NRE and tooling costs, especially for custom components specific to the model being analyzed (mechanical components especially). Unless assumed volumes are different by an order of magnitude, minor changes in volume (say 1 million vs. 2) rarely have a large net effect on our final analysis because of this.

Huawei Vodafone 736 Mobile Phone - Main PCB Bottom

As part of iSuppli's Design Forecast Tool (DFT), we forecast handset shipments by major design feature and manufacture, as well as the number of design starts a manufacturer will have by feature set.

From our Design Forecast Tool (DFT), we estimate unit shipments of 104 million UMTS handsets in the 2009 global market. All estimates are based on the assumption of 2 year life span.

Huawei Vodafone 736 Mobile Phone Cost Analysis

Main Cost Drivers Representing ~71% of total materials cost

Qualcomm - QSC6240 - Baseband Processor / RF Transceiver - Single-Chip, Quad-Band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, Tri-Band WCDMA, Bluetooth, A-GPS, w/ Integrated Power Management & Multimedia Processor

Wintek - WD-F2432YW-9FLWa - Display Module Value Line Item - 2.0' Diagonal, Color TFT LCD, 240 x 320 pixels

Camera Module Value Line Item - 2MP, Format, Fixed Lens

Hynix - H8BCS0QG0MBP - MCP - 1Gb NAND Flash + 512Mb Mobile DDR (Estimated)

Huawei - HB4A1H - Battery - Li-Ion, 3.7V, 900mAh

AT&S - 6-Layer - FR4/RCF HDI - 2+2+2, Lead-Free

Qualcomm - BTS4020 - Bluetooth - SoC, V2.0+EDR, 0.13um

RF Micro Devices - RF3161 - PAM - Quad-Band GSM/EDGE, w/ Integrated Power Control

Enclosure, Main, Battery Cover - Stamped / Formed Metal, Machined, Anodized

FEM - Quad-Band GSM / WCDMA2100, SP7T Antenna Switch & 2 Dual-Band GSM RX SAW Filters

Enclosure, Display, Bottom - Stamped / Formed Steel, w/ 3 Spot-Welded Metal Tabs

Enclosure, Display, Center - Injection Molded Polycarbonate & Insert-Molded Stamped / Formed Metal, Painted

Total BOM Cost $57.23

What Is Not Included in our Cost Analysis

The total materials and manufacturing costs reported in this analysis reflect ONLY the direct materials cost (from component vendors and assorted EMS providers), AND manufacturing with basic test. Not included in this analysis are costs above and beyond the material manufacture of the core device itself - cost of intellectual property, royalties and licensing fees (those not already included into the per component price), software, software loading and test, shipping, logistics marketing and other channel costs including not only EMS provider and the OEM's margin, but that of other resellers. Our cost analysis is meant to focus on those costs incurred in the manufacture of the core device and exceptionally in some circumstances the packaging and literature as well.

Manufacturing Notes

Huawei's Relationships / Manufacturing

We do not track, as part of iSuppli research, Huawei's manufacturing and EMS relationships, however, based on their Chinese origins, we are assuming that Huawei are building in house and sourcing, where not otherwise noted domestically in China.

Country of Origin / Volume Assumptions

Based on markings, the unit was assembled in China. Furthermore, we have assumed that custom mechanicals (plastics, metals, etc.) were also sourced in China.

Country of origin assumptions relate directly to the associated cost of manufacturing, where calculated by iSuppli. In the cases of 'finished' sub-assemblies (such as Display Module), we do not calculate internal manufacturing costs, but rather assess the market price of the finished product in which case country of origin assumptions may or may not have a direct effect on pricing.

Remember also that labor rates are applied directly only to hand inserted components and systems in our bill of materials, and although regional assumptions do, these new rates do not have a direct effect on our modeled calculations of placement costs for automated SMD assembly lines. ""Auto" inserted components (such as SMT components) placement costs are calculated by an iSuppli algorithm which allocates a cost per component based on the size and pincount of the device. This calculation is affected by country or region of origin as well.

Design for Manufacturing / Device Complexity

The Huawei Vodafone 736 has an overall component count of 653, of which, 142 are mechanical in nature. The device exhibits larger component count complexity as compared to its electronic sibling, the Vodafone 735 with 505 and 94 counts respectively. The added complexity is mainly due to the slider mechanism as the 3200 is essentially a slider implementation of the candybar 735.

Component counts have a direct bearing on the overall manufacturing cycle times and costs, and also can increase or decrease overall yields and re-work. Our calculations of manufacturing costs factor counts and more qualitative complexities in the design. The cost of manufacturing is also, to some extent, decreased in this case because of assumed labor rate applied for China.

Note that manual labor has a much smaller effect on auto-insertion assembly lines (for the Main PCB, for example), where manufacturing costs are much more capital equipment intensive and driven by these investment costs.

Design Notes

The Vodafone 736 by Huawei features a primarily Qualcomm design with the QSC6240 ""value" baseband processor and RF transceiver. This also includes a Qualcomm BTS4025 Bluetooth v2.1 solution. Supporting this core Qualcomm design are Hynix MCP memory package containing 1Gb NAND flash and 512Mb mobile DDR memory as well as a RF Micro RF3161 PAM solution.

Here is a summary of the major components used in the Huawei Vodafone 736 design:

Main PCB

Baseband / RF Transceiver

• Baseband Processor / RF Transceiver - Qualcomm - QSC6240

Memory

• MCP - Hynix - H8BCS0QG0MBP

User Interface

• Bluetooth - Qualcomm - BTS4020
• FM Radio Tuner - Silicon Laboratories - Si4702-C19-GM

Power Amplifier

• PAM - RF Micro Devices - RF3161 Quad-Band GSM/EDGE
• PAM - Avago - ACPM-7381 WCDMA/HSDPA 2100MHz, 1950MHz

Display

• 2.0' Diagonal, Color TFT LCD, 240 x 320 pixels

Huawei Vodafone 736 Mobile Phone - Enclosure Disassembly