KrisWillis.com

So I accidentally spilled a cup of tea over my Blackberry. Fortunately, after drying it off most of it worked perfectly bar one of the most important components in a mobile phone – The microphone.

After doing a little research, it turns out that the mic is surface mounted to the keyboard PCB so to replace the mic I’d need a new (or working) keyboard PCB. The only place I could find this component new was on some American website, which after shipping and other taxes involved in importing stuff, would have cost about £70. Or, I could have sent it off to Vodafone for repair at a cost of £60 and a few weeks Blackberry-less no doubt.

I ended up grabbing what was described as a faulty 8800 from someone on eBay for about £40, the description said it had a software fault, so there was a good chance that the hardware was in good condition. It turns out that there was nothing wrong with it from what I could gather after messing around with it for a couple of minutes. But it was on the o2 network, so no use to me. (more…)