How to Fix a Sony Ericsson W550i (Part 1)

I actually have a lecture when I’m writing this, but so what?

My Sony Ericsson W550i is 3+ years old now. It still works well, low battery life of course, but then let me introduce you a problem that has plagued a lot of W550is around the world:

The top half of the phone became loose from the bottom half. As you can see in this picture, this is normally due to the dislocation of the rotating mechanism from the top half. Screws should hold the two together but I don’t know why it gets loose so easily.

I sent my phone for repairs twice for this problem already and it costed me around RM30-50. So this time, the hell with repair shops, I’m a second year engineering student! Let’s take matters into my own hands for a change instead of paying someone else to do it (I’m actually broke, so no choice anyway).

I never open up a phone before, and I don’t even have a guide for this. Well, exploring yourself is more fun anyway . Plus, this is a 3 year old phone (that no one wants to accept for trade-in anymore) so if anything wrong happens, xdala sakit hati gilak. So let’s get on to this!

First step is, obviously, to take out the battery cover and the battery itself. Oh before I forgot, if you’re using this as a guide, you need these screwdrivers:

The labeling there said these are Torx T7 and Phillips #0 screwdrivers, but then this is a cheapo screwdriver set I bought at the SuperSave store so I don’t know if you can trust it. So anyway,

I unscrewed the 4 screws here using the Torx screwdriver (the right one was hidden under the warranty sticker).

On the keypad side of the phone, I had to peel off the soft plastic around the Walkman logo to unscrew the 2 screws hidden under it. The screws here are longer than the previous ones, so don’t mix them up when reassembling the phone later. Now this part is the hardest part (not that hard actually), slowly dislocate the bottom part from the keypad part. Be careful not to break anything here.

Here are the innards of the phone. I’m gonna take off the two ribbon cables there but before that, I took note (well, photo to know) which cable goes where. In this picture, you can see that the left cable has 2 small white rectangles and the right one has a blue dot.

Then you’ll have two parts like this:

The end.

Hehe jk. On to Page 2 >