Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Washed to death

423 words

I came late to the mobile telephony party and only recently I had my cheapo Motofone F3 for a year. I rarely used, but this weekend it was time to say goodbye. Or rather to say ‘AH HELLO!’ to the phone when I opened the washing machine.

I tried washing the thing a little and drying it thoroughly (as annoying and noisy as the heat vented out of the back of a MacBook is, it’s great for gently drying things), but that didn’t help. Connecting the phone to the power adaptor didn’t revive the screen - just the little charger light. Well, I can’t blame it. Finally a technological problem that was solely created by Sven FAIL. I quite enjoy that to be honest. No cleaning up after other people’s mistakes but a simple consequence of a simple mistake.

Motofone F3 disassembled

In the hope of finding some more humidity inside the phone I opened it. The four (actually only three in my phone after the washing, the fourth must be living in the washing machine now) silver screws on the back are easily removed although they have a strange shape. After a bit of fiddling the case is disassembled and four more little screws have to be removed to loosen electronics and connectors from the ‘main board’ with the keypad and screen. Note the little red stickers which are in visible and invisible locations inside the phone. I think they only turned red when they became wet.

The ‘electronic paper’ screen really is super thin as are all of the eletronics in fact. The super scratch resistant surface of the phone’s screen is nothing but a kind of plastic sticker that covers all of the front and there is no soldering whatsoever between the parts you can disassemble. There’s a socket for ports/electronics to stick into the main board and the speaker is simply squeezed and magneted into position which I thought was quite cool.

I also worked on solving the phone problem by simply ordering a new one from eBay. There are loads of them and people who get them with their contracts seem to be keen on selling them. Well, thanks. As we had plenty of crêpes this afternoon and skipped the pizza, half of my new phone is already paid for…

Close-up of some parts of the Motofone F3

Lesson possibly learned: Even if you return home late at night and your clothes are smelly and dirty, it may be worth waiting until the morning before putting them into the washing machine.


See more photos of the phone’s innards.

July 14, 2008, 0:33

Tagged as disassemble, ebay, electronics, motofone f3, phone.

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