« Squeezy Marmite | Main | Friday Roundup »
October 09, 2006
A Girl Can Never Have Too Many Small Screwdrivers
My beloved Sony Ericsson K750i, the best phone I've ever owned, developed a fault. The camera stopped working, all of a sudden. No damage or anything, no sign that anything was wrong, no pictures. I don't want to replace it just yet because its obvious successor, the CyberShot phone, feels rather 1.0 to me. Also, it's bigger than the K750i and I'm not sure I want a bigger phone. So I want to wait for the next generation of camera phones. And having had a camera phone for over a year, I find I can't live without that sense of always, always, having the camera with me.
Turns out that the fault is a common one and there is a K750i dismantling guide on the Internet. Phone shops quote fix prices for this fault ranging from $12 in Peru to £100 in London. Hmm.
I'd never properly opened up anything as fiddly as a phone before. And I needed a new screwdriver! A Torx T6. I had some larger Torx, but none of the tiny ones. By a strange coincidence, Maplin has just opened a branch on the Strand, for all my superfluous technology needs. Got the driver, did the repair (as well as the T6, I needed my tiniest Philips, and a flat thin piece of plastic to free the cover clips -- they recommended a guitar pick, but I used a 16Mb SmartMedia card), and my phone works again.
Go me.
Posted by Alison Scott at October 9, 2006 11:17 PM