Editor's Note: For a fuller parts list, click here.
As every cell phone user knows, the more you use your mobile, the more likely it will suffer physical trauma. Pull it out to grab a call, and a slip of the hand sends it tumbling. Take a phone near a lake, and it will be among the first to seek out the water. Mobility and morbidity seem closely linked.
Enter the Casio GizOne Type-V, a ruggedized clamshell-style cell phone for Verizon's CDMA network. The GizOne claims to have passed military specification (Mil-spec) tests for shock and moisture resistance, building on Casio's long and successful line of stout G-Shock watches. The GizOne was initially introduced to the Japanese market in 2005 and enjoyed great popularity. The recent U.S. launch suggests that the demand for a robust design is global.
A fish aquarium demo of the GizOne family earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show caught my eye. Casio's marketing folks figured a live functional phone submerged with a group of goldfish would make its point. I was curious to see how Casio had equipped the phone to endure hours in the tank.
Beyond its water and humidity resistance, the design is claimed to have survived multipass drop tests from 1.5 meters, two days' exposure to saltwater fog, vibration tests and dust-resistance tests consistent with MIL-STD-810F. We didn't verify the claims, but a read of the spec certainly bolsters the notion that the tests are a decent proxy for the abuse an average user might heap on a cell phone.
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While the GizOne promotes tool-like toughness, it still offers a modern feature set. A 2-megapixel camera with LED flash (doubling as a flashlight) joins up with two displays: a 262,144-color, QVGA, 240 x 320-pixel, TFT-LCD unit inside, and a monochrome, 100 x 100-pixel, STN display outside. The GizOne also supports Verizon's Vcast application suite and video service, along with Assisted GPS (A-GPS) location technology, picture and ringer ID, 72 polyphonic ringtones, 1xEvDO data, an Openwave microbrowser, messaging, predictive text entry and Brew (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) applications. Casio claims the 3.7-volt, 1,050-milliampere-hour battery delivers up to 3.2 hours of talk time and 400 hours of standby time.
The dual-band CDMA (850/1,900-MHz) communications capability relies on a Qualcomm chip set centered on the company's MSM6550 baseband. The MSM6550 is a two-chip package that splits analog and digital baseband duties into separate dice whose process technologies can be optimized for their respective functions.
The radio transceiver path is also split up, this time into separately packaged chips. Given the always-on nature of CDMA's frequency-division protocol, Qualcomm thus far has chosen to let the physical isolation of chips address the electrical isolation of potentially interfering signals.
On the radio front end, an RFMD RF5144 dual-band RF power amp (transmit) and Qualcomm RFL6000 low-noise amp (receive) join to an interesting "quintplexer" from Avago. The ACFM-7101 combines two duplexers, for isolating the receive and transmit portions of each CDMA band, along with handling signals associated with the GizOne's A-GPS function. The internal filters rely on Avago's film bulk acoustic resonator technology, an alternative to the widely used surface-acoustic-wave devices visible in other parts of the GizOne's radio implementation. Casio opted for a Matsushita/Panasonic AN32110A power management ASIC over Qualcomm's often-seen PM6650 alternative.
