Portelligent analyst David Carey and his colleagues opened up an iPhone and inspected the chips inside. There was nothing really amazing, but there was a healthy amount of engineering fascination, according to Information Week on Sunday.

"...having a place among the suppliers of key ICs that enable the iPhone carries heavy bragging rights in the semiconductor industry," said David Carey, president and CTO at Portelligent. "Without pre-judging the commercial success of the iPhone itself, there’s no doubt that the semiconductor makers who have chips in this product view their design-win as having significance that goes beyond just the revenue implications � it helps validate their solution and their approach."

Among those companies with components appearing in the iPhone are: Infineon, Wolfson, Skyworks, Marvell, CSR, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Broadcom, Texas Instruments and Linear Technology.

Mr. Carey’s reaction was one of "engineering fascination." Dead air was minimized. While the hardware components were interesting, and the manufacturing process, with many screws and difficult orientations made for a complex piece of hardware, the real the elegance of the phone seems to come from the software.

Mr. Carey, who has torn down many technology products, was amazed. "I’m still a bit giddy from playing with it � it really has a jewelery-like quality in some respects. I’ll reserve on further gushing until potential warts emerge � I’m sure there are some latent faults � but it’s hard to deny the ’Wow Factor’ at the moment."

A related article at Techonline Sunday showed photographs and had technical details of the chips and part IDs.