The Ware for March 2009 is shown below. Click the photo for a much larger version.

This ware is interesting because it’s the guts of an appliance that I owned that nearly caught fire. The dark brown tint of the epoxy overcoat is evidence of its smokey demise. Bonus points for anyone who can correctly guess what instigated the death of this ware.

The Ware for February 2009 is a P202 wifi telephony handset made for the company “Talk4free”, which actually I don’t know much about, except that it’s out of business, and that there’s a pile of these sitting in a factory in China. I was personally a bit surprised to see the all-Agere chipset — Agere is not really a leader in the wifi space. Plus, it’s using some fairly exotic memory chips (K1S3216B, a 32Mbit pseudo-SRAM). It reminds me a bit of another product I took apart once but didn’t feature on the blog (maybe I should?…hmm, I was going to draw some comparisons but now that I think about it I should save this one for later, because I’m not finding many google hits on it). Most of the part number markings and the PCB date code indicate the device was built in late 2005, so this design had been kicking around for a while. Too bad the corpse of this product can’t reveal any deeper secrets about what went wrong at the company that invested in its design; it’s always sad to see aborted products, as there’s nothing more frustrating for me than to pour my effort into a product that never sees the light of day.

Picking a winner is hard, since a lot of people guessed the type of ware correctly. I’ll more or less arbitrarily pick Brendan as the winner, since he guessed with the most detailed answer first and also took a stab at the business model behind the phone. Congrats, email me for your prize!

The Ware for February 2009 is shown below. Click the link for a much larger version.

One of the guidelines I have about picking wares for this competition is that they should have been “in production” at least once upon a time, even in small volume. In other words, I avoid posting one-off prototypes (unless there’s a really interesting story behind it) so that there is a reasonable chance someone could positively identify it.

Thanks to the recession, I have a bit of a spin I can put on that rule. The ware above was “in production” (there’s a factory in China sitting on a pile of these) but the company that ordered them is now defunct, so I don’t think it ever made it to market. That would define this product as a pre-production prototype — normally kept secret — but since the company is gone, it’s fair game for a teardown (or at least, they stiffed the factory, so what would you expect?). It’s not a particularly tough ware to guess in terms of function (its form factor is a bit of a giveaway), but it will be interesting to see if anyone can identify the exact model number (one was assigned) and company — or business model — for this ware.

I did a double-post last time for Name that Ware, so I’ll do a double-judging this time as well.

January’s ware is the Philips XP3422 photomultiplier tube, and Jim is the winner for correctly identifying it and providing a link to a document that discusses how to use this tube. I didn’t realize it was for use in gamma ray camera arrays! The hex shape for dense packing makes sense now. Thanks for the info, and congrats.

December’s ware is a Wintek Wince 6800 control module. Johny ^_^ got the answer correct first. And Keith, yes, I’d be happy to send the TGIMBOEJ on to you!

Congrats to everyone and drop me an email to claim your prizes (or your box of stuff as it may be — just need your mailing address).