Kindle Fire HDX Teardown: Blazing Guts (Just Pray It Doesn’t Break)

Kindle Fire HDX Teardown: Blazing Guts (Just Pray It Doesn’t Break)

We’re big fans of Amazon’s new Kindle Fire HDX, but we’ve been waiting to see exactly what lurks within its sleek frame for a while. Fortunately, iFixit has now stripped it bare, and it’s thumbs up all round — unless you wanna try to repair it.

iFixit reports that the device is certainly stuffed full with top-grade components: prying it open revealed that blazing Snapdragon 800 SoC with a 2.2GHz quad-core CPU and 2GB of Samsung SDRAM, along with a chunky 4550mAh battery.

But working all that out was, apparently, no mean feat. “A glued-in battery, tucked beneath a nearly-impossible-to-replace motherboard, spells doom for this device,” explains iFixit. “It also earns the Fire HDX 7″ a 3 out of 10 on our repairability score — the lowest score for any Kindle we’ve ever taken apart.”

It’s not all bad news. Plenty of the smaller components are modular, for instance, with the volume buttons, microphones, and headphone jack all separate pieces that could be swapped out. But the overall message is that, while the hardware is top notch, it’s not one for tinkerers. [iFixit]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.