By popular demand, the Ware for October 2010 is shown below:

You may already be familiar with the image. This was the circuit board attached to the bottom of a toner cartridge found in a “suspicious package” on a UPS plane earlier today. I’ve had several people write-in to request that I make this device the ware for the month to see what opinions readers have on the identity of the circuit board. The ten-second look at the board places it pretty solidly as a cell phone motherboard; there is a vibrator motor at the top left, customary RF lids to cover the radios, and a size and connector layout consistent with a low-end feature phone.

I’m guessing some reader can probably ID this down to the make and model from this picture alone…

The wares for September 2010 were a zoom-in on a 1000baseT PHY circuit, and the trackball of a Blackberry phone. I think the zoom-in format worked fairly well, so I may try it again in the future.

Picking a single winner was hard, so I’ll name both Ben Hutchings and Garrett Kelly as winners, since they were each the first to guess a respective ware. Congrats, email me for your prize!

The Wares for September 2010 are shown below.

Ware A:

Ware B:

So I’ve decided to mix up the format a bit: instead of photographing the entire body of an obscure ware, I’m going to try for the next couple of months to show a photo of a magnified portion of a very common ware. The challenge is to figure out what is the type or function of the common ware that this magnified portion belongs to. The photographed regions are all picked so that a reasonably specific and correct solution can be derived if you are paying attention to all the details.

Because I don’t know how hard this will be, I’ve decided to include two photos this time of completely unrelated wares, just in case one is totally unguessable, or if one is just way too trivial. This complicates judging a bit, but basically someone who can guess both will be picked over someone who can just guess one.