Stefan Mileschin

The Blackberry Z10 looks surprisingly like a Samsung S3 when you take the back off.

According to a teardown, carried out by UBM TechInsights, the main components look remarkably Samsungish. There is a Snapdragon S4 Plus chip, some other Qualcommm parts, and Samsung-made RAM and storage.

Many of the design decisions on the inside seem to run parallel with those made by Samsung for the Galaxy S3.

According to the teardown report, the Blackberry Z10 seems to incorporate many of the component selections of the Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE.

It's not certain if these decisions the designers made on what semiconductors, ICs and other modules to use were by design or by accident, the report said.

Now given that RIM, er, Blackberry, needs its Z10 to be a success, it is fairly likely that the similarities between the Z10 and the S3 are no accident.

Blackberry can at least truthfully put its hand on its heart and say that there is a difference between the two phones' software.

The report adds that the real big winner of the Z10 design is Qualcomm, with four major socket wins within the Z10.

Much like the LTE version of Samsung Galaxy S3, the Blackberry Z10 is powered by the MSM8960 baseband/applications processor. The MSM8960 integrates a multi-mode 3G/LTE modem while incorporating two asynchronous CPU cores and the Adreno 225 GPU for the applications side of the processor, the report said.

For the Blackberry Z10, the two CPU cores are clocked at 1.5 GHz of processing speed. The MSM8960 is manufactured at the 28nm processing node which makes for a power-efficient processor, a necessity considering the battery requirements of LTE-enabled handsets, it added.

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