Tales of a Motorola Flip Phone repair

I have a Motorola Micro Tac classic phone. It's very old now and I don't use it anymore. I don't even know if anyone still runs the analogue networks it needs, but I still hang onto it. During it's long and active life, it suffered repeated drops from it's home in my shirt pocket. Some of the subsequent impacts with the stone floor resulted in the odd crack to the plastic case, but the electronics were OK. As I am an engineer I thought it should be no problem to just replace the broken bits. I contacted Motorola for spares, but, even though I am an experienced electronics engineer, they refused point blank to supply the bits I needed (not legal in the UK but hey, multinationals can do what they like!), but I could pay Ł80 to have the phone fixed.

I resolved to try to fix the phone myself! If any of you net surfers want to do the same, just remember that your phone should be your personal property and well out of warranty and if you break it worse, it's all your fault OK!

There were a few facts which Motorola did not want me to find out.

The most important thing was that there was nothing electronic inside the flip at all, so my phone still worked perfectly well without the flip there at all! The designers had included a fake mic in the flip just to confuse and make us punters think that the flip made the phone work better. (I understand that some very early ones did have the mic in the flip, with a wire in the hinge.) My flip contains a small magnet which activates a reed switch when you open or close it. (This lets you answer or hang up without pressing any buttons.)

The Screw To get into the phone I needed to do four things. I undid an M2 torx screw in the middle of the battery surface (and replaced it with a slotted M2 screw to make life easier in the future as that size of torx driver is difficult to find.).

The Cowl The plastic cowl at the base of the antenna needed to be pulled away and the coil unplugged from it's socket.

Snap clips in each corner Then there were 4 plastic snap clips which held the back and front halves of the phone together, and then the secret hidden bit, which took me ages and ages to find, was the sliding hinges holding the flip and also holding the two halves of the phone together!

Unhooking the hinge pegs I had to fish down in the slot where the car charger plugs in and insert the end of a small jeweller's screwdriver into the holes in the ends of the plastic pegs and pull them towards the centre of the phone. Open Phone After that the back of the phone came off quite easily and I could detach the flip for gluing. I was able to carefully prize the two halves of the flip apart without causing extra damage, and confirm that there was no microphone inside it. I also needed to do this to fit the pawl and spring back in after gluing so that the phone could snap open and shut. Alternatively I thought of leaving the pawl out so that I could flick the phone open "Captain Kirk" style. Maybe I'm just not that much of a Star Trek fan! Ł80 saved!!!

Exploded view of my flip.

The phone still worked fine like this!

But remember DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME (unless you're an electronics engineer, the phone is your personal property AND know what you're doing!) IF YOU TAKE YOUR PHONE TO AN OFFICIAL ENGINEER AFTER YOU BREAK IT WORSE THEY WILL CHARGE YOU A LOT!

So why did I put this page together?

Well a number of reasons, but mostly because I felt that the information should be available on request, and if Motorola were not going to make it available, there was nothing to stop me!

Why did I decide to repair my phone when new ones are so cheap?

Tricky one that, but as well as getting tight fisted in my old age, I liked my phone. I didn't want a nice new digital one, even though there are loads of new sexy features, for three reasons:-

Last I heard the UK coverage was still not as wide (especially off the coast when I'm sailing my boat)
I work in a number of broadcast studios and digital phones cause havoc with mic-level audio signals. More and more studios are getting fed up with ruined takes, and, quite rightly, banning them from anywhere near recording equipment.
The people suffering from strange cases of "fried brain" seem to be getting it since the digital phones came along. Not too surprising as they tend to transmit microwaves, whereas the analogue phones tend to operate at lower frequencies which are absorbed less by body tissues. I don't want to microwave my brain just yet. I'll let other people be the proof of the safety or otherwise!

Epilogue

I was finally coerced into a digital phone by my network provider claiming that my phone had been cloned and making it as awkward for me as they could to stay analogue. I don't believe that my phone was cloned because nobody ever tried to make any fraudulent calls! But that didn't stop them from cutting me off without warning. I am told that cloned phones can be easily re-chipped with a new non cloned identity, but they did not offer me this option, thus adding the the evidence that it was all a scam to make me go digital.
I now have a nice Ericsson SH888 (with no flip!) which talks to my Psion and lets me do Fax, E-mail and a bit of web browsing. I also notice that they have angled the aerial away from the head a little bit. It's not much, but not much makes quite a difference at short range. Is this enough to compensate for my brain being gently microwaved? Only time will tell.
There is the hands free walkman style thingy to take the phone away from my head while still letting me talk. Handy while in the car! Some research has suggested that far from microwaving your brain less, these things help to send the microwaves straight into your ear. Mmmm... perhaps I should put a ferrite bead on the cord..?

Second epilogue

I finally succumbed to the temptation to get a cheap upgrade to one of those offers for a cheap upgrade of my phone. The main attraction being access to GPRS. The phone I chose was the Sony Ericsson T610. This is nice and small, and I can see if I have e-mails in my inbox, but even after a year I have not found any way to for my laptop to access the net via it. (So I keep the SH888 for that and it still works just fine.)

It has a really poor quality digital camera built in, so I can take fuzzy pictures and send them to people - and it's the smallest phone I've had so far. No wonder they are popular.

The pictures below were taken with my phone. Quite fun, but no threat to anything that might be described as a proper camera!

And Recently........

How things change in a few years! My latest phone is a Sony Ericsson K750i. No longer the latest thing, but I have to admit that when I first got this phone I was a lot more impressed than I expected to be. It's nice and small but manages to pack in a half decent camera, MP3 player and an almost useable email client. (Orange, bless 'em, have even managed to get the GPRS working from my laptop though not my Psion 5MX)

I've become a bit of a camera phone convert now. The real advantage is that you have your camera with you all the time, so when you see something worth snapping you can get a picture, like for example when I pulled my dog away from this owl it had cornered under the hedge. Needless to say it had long gone by the time I got back there with my proper camera!

I have uploaded the image file unmodified (apart from the filename) from the phone so you can judge the image quality for yourself. (Right click and save the image to see it full size on your computer)

If you liked this page and want to find more pages, which tell you how to take mobile phones apart, you might like this site:
http://www.excelldirect.com
I like this site, (well I would wouldn't I?) These guys sell the parts for phones, and show you how to fit them! What a top site! I bet the phone manufacturers hate them. I wonder how long before the bad guys shut them down….Keep up the good work excelldirect!