
Lazaridis also showed off the Bold 9700's circuit board at the briefing, pointing out that it was designed at RIM's Bochum facility.
The quad-band HSPDA to GSM radios, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS circuitry are at the bottom of the board, with CPU and memory in the middle and audio/vibrator and power controllers up top. The silvery-gold racetracks around each cluster of chips are designed to solder to metal shields that electrically isolate each function.
One of the major design challenges for handset makers is avoiding mutual interference between so many sensitive functions and so many transmitters in such a small space.
Rupert Goodwins of ZDNet UK contributed to this report.






