Need advice: broken speaker

[vma]

Hi,

The speaker on the outside of my universal (the onw you hold against your ear with when the screen is on the inside) is broken.

That started as something like a bad contact (if I pressed the phone against my ear it would work, otherwise not). Now it is not working at all.

The speaker on the LCD side is working fine.

The advice I want:

I took a look at the service manual PDF I got and disassembling the phone to reach that speaker is a lot of work. I do have experience with diassembling electronic devices and even do some soldering, etc. However, my doubt is this: I have a phone which does work, but the way I like to use it to make calls does not work.

Question 1

Is it worth the trouble to diasassemble the whole device just to check if it is indeed a bad contact due to i.e. dirt? Or will I actually risk breaking something off, which will render the complete phone useless? Looking at the service manual, one needs to use a plastic tool to actually open the phone. How easy do the hinges break off?

Question 2

Has anyone had a similar problem? Was it easy to fix?

Thank you!

Cheers,
vma

[scousemartin]

you dont need to disassemble the whole phone just disassemble the screen . It isnt that hard to do, just remove all the screws from the screen . The screen casing is difficult to budge at first but once you have freed part of it open, the rest follows quite easily.

[vma]

Hi,

Meanwhile I couldn't resist and opened it...
...and I found the guilty part.

It seems that the outside speaker is actually attached to the case and uses a contact connection to the PCB. This connection is made by to metal plates, which are tiny and folded. They will compensate the varying pressure made on the case (i.e. when you press it) and I guess with time they tend to break at the fold.

This happend to one of the two contacts. First I tried to fix it, but the truth is that it is so small that it is quite impossible to do anything about it. I considered soldering a small wire, but that would require to solder the other end to the pin on the PCB, which then would mean, I could no longer use a regular replacement speaker, if this one had any other fault (unless I could clean the contact again, but trying that, I could break something else, also).

This means: now I am not able to use the outside speaker anymore... :(

Question: where can I purchase a replacement one? Would anyone sell me one from a broken Universal (for a symbolic price - anything over 10 Euro is too much, as I would prefer to just buy a another second hand Universal)?

And as I was figuring this out, I used the occation to fix that loose stylus!

1) Open the underside case (4 screws, then open the case all around with some thin plastic).
2) Roll a little bit of celotape and place it between the case and the pin that fixes the stylus in position.
3) Try it out until it is OK.
4) Close the case and that's it!

Cheers,
vma

[kecido]

Hi buddy, in fact I did have the same problem that you're having some months ago, my uni fell and since then the problem just got worst, until some day a couple months ago I opened it and fix it.

It's just like you say, the little golden plated contacts wore off, then the little speaker's metal plates just were too high to make any contact against the pcb, it's really simple, just pull the plates gently away from the little speaker, do clean both sides of the contacts (pcb and speaker's plates), i did this with a little xacto knife (be very gentle), and that's it! It worked just fine.

[vma]

The problem is that in my case one of the metal plates broke off.

I tried to fix that, but it is to small for me to achive anything.

Cheers,
vma