Bollock'sed to Brilliant!

Holidays! Great! Till you do something bloody moronic like go for a swim with your phone in your swim shorts pocket!! Good job there was free beer where we were staying! Fortunately pool water is not as corrosive as sea water, sea water...forget it, that thing is toast! If the water doesn't damage it, the salt on any electronics will get uber corroded and short out!

I soon as I realised what I had done, I pulled the back off it and let it dry out in the baking Turkish heat. That didn't do the trick, which was a surprise (24DegC outside! toasty!), tried to power and vibrated constantly, had to yank the battery out!

So managed to unscrew the screws holding the thing together (about 6x PH000 heads), and rather than straining my extremely poor Turkish for: "Please can I have a blow of rice grains?" I got one of the kids nappies (unused of course, which are rich in silica crystals to keep arse's dry all night long!) and wrapped the whole thing in it and left it for the rest of the holiday, only putting it all back to together and bagging all the loose bits till we went back.

Damage Report

1. Went to power on after a week in a nappy and it booted! Audio notification could be heard but no screen. Screen was already cracked from dropping it on gravel, so water must have ingresses through the cracks and penetrated the screen.
2. I looked on youtube for some video's on dismantling the phone (HTC 310 desire - see below). Managed to pull back cover off and remove the touch screen connector and the display connections - both had minor charring where they had clear short cos of the water and some tracks on the flexi pcb had come off! bad times

Old & Busted, New Hotness!

Thanks to our Ruski friend and an ebay find, I managed to fit the new screen for about £20!

The only issue I had was that the adhesive you fit the screen back on: as you can see from the video, its all gungy and very tacky! The only thing I could find was some equally tacky double backed tape, which I stuck in place and use a scalpel to remove the unwanted parts and cut holes for connections and the camera. It seemed to do the trick!

The only oversight was I didn't cut the hole out of my gasket big enough for the front facing camera!

Its crap anyway and never use it!

I tested the screen first by part assembling the phone and using the battery powering it and it worked! Display and touch screen, so my worries of the display and touch drivers on the motherboard being borked were removed!

The only down side - one single dead pixel....well for £20, I can live with that....till I get my upgrade!

So all in all for a £20 safe gamble I managed to save the ball ache of either forking out for a full repair, or worse, going back to vodaphone and trying to sort out a new phone or even worse a brand new contract!