iPhone 4S gets torn down, reveals slightly bigger battery and Sony camera sensor

You knew it was only a matter of time before iFixit got its hands on the new iPhone 4S and skillfully tore it apart and like clockwork, they have. As usual, this brought on some interesting discoveries.

First of all, even on the inside the iPhone 4S looks identical to the iPhone 4 although there’s more than what meets the eye. For starters, the iPhone 4S has a bigger battery, .05Whr bigger, compared to the iPhone 4′s battery. This means that where the iPhone 4 battery was 1,420mAh, the iPhone 4S battery is 1,432mAh. This is important because despite the almost negligible increase in battery size and the more powerful hardware the iPhone 4 still manages to get more or less the same battery life figures as the iPhone 4.

The second revelations comes in the form of the 8 megapixel rear camera sensor. Although it looks nondescript on the surface, a trip under an electronic microscope revealed that it is manufactured by Sony.

Lastly we come to the 512MB RAM that can be found inside the A5 chip, which is the same as the one on the iPad 2 but under-clocked to 800MHz, probably in the interests of battery life. The decision to stick with 512MB was probably made to achieve the same goal, as higher RAM simply consumes more power, regardless of whether it is being used or not. And with iOS not having traditional multi-tasking, where the entire application runs in the background, higher RAM is not a necessity.

The rest of the phone remains mostly identical to the 4S on the inside, including the display that is glued to the front glass, causing repairs an expensive affair in case the front glass shatters (which it tends to when the phone falls on a hard surface). This phone, like its predecessor, is not very difficult to take apart and as long as you have a Pentalobe screwdriver you should be able to pop the hood and poke around inside yourself.

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