Tag Archives: sony

Feb 10

Disassembling a Sony Ericsson MW600

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MW600

MW600

Some months ago I bought a Sony Ericsson MW600 bluetooth receiver to use when working out. Unfortunately after a month it started malfunctioning. One day during a workout while playing music it made a beeping sound every few seconds. I turned it off and tried to turn it back on but it refused to do so. I left it to rest a few hours and tried again, this time it worked. However, from that moment on I couldn’t get the MW600 to turn on reliably anymore. This weekend I figured I should try and peek inside, see what’s wrong. There’s a video on YouTube showing how to open it up but it’s not entirely clear at some point so I made a picture guide how to open it up properly. If you have a white version as is shown in the video I think the packaging is a little different so you might have to figure out a thing or two on your own. If you have the black version, this guide should be sufficient to completely disassemble it.

MW600

MW600

So, how do you start?

Make sure you have small cross and flathead screwdriver and a small box to put in the tiny parts of the MW600 so you don’t lose them.

I will try to give a little explanation next to each picture (click to enlarge) so you can comfortably take the device apart.

 Let’s get started! DISCLAIMER: I’m not responsible in any way if you break or damage your MW600 in the disassembly process!

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Remove plastic

Remove plastic

Remove screw

Remove screw

First of all you need to remove the little plastic cover below the microUSB port.

It covers up the first screw that holds together the port cover and the main body.

Remove the screw.

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Remove pushbutton

Remove pushbutton

Take care!

Take care!

Remove the plastic pushbutton to reveal the actual pushbutton.

Take care when handling the parts. I managed to break off the little pushbutton to power on/off the MW600 and it’s really easy to lose it!

It’s very fragile so make sure you handle it with care.

Remove clip

Remove clip

Another screw!

Another screw!

Next is removing the clip. Slide your fingernail between the two parts highlighted in the image on the left. While you gently add space between them, use your other hand to push the clip upwards until it jumps free.

This will reveal the second and last screw you need to remove.

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Remove plastic

Remove plastic

You can remove the other plastic part from the main body. Once that’s out of the way, we’re almost done removing parts to remove the PCB from its plastic cover.

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Remove buttons

Remove buttons

Metal thingy

Metal thingy

Next up, on the side of the device, there are Previous Start/Pause and Next buttons. In fact, that’s just one strip of plastic. Use a fingernail to remove this strip. Under it there’s a small metal thingy, make sure to remove it as well.

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Remove outer plastic

Remove plastic

The side

The side

Lastly, there’s a plastic part that surrounds the gap, again, use your fingernail to remove it from the main body.

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Remove body

Remove body

Remove call button

Remove call button

Continuing, now you’re free to remove the plastic hull, make sure to remove the call button in the process as it isn’t attached to anything else and will fall off.

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Remove cover

Remove cover

Both parts

Both parts

It gets a little trickier, try not to break the cover for the screen. You can detach it from the main body at the highlighted area. If there’s some glue holding bits and pieces together, don’t worry, you can pull it off without breaking stuff!

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The battery

The battery

Once that’s done, you can turn over the device and remove the battery. It most likely will be “stuck”, just use a little force (or use a screwdriver) to remove it.

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Detach flaps

Detach flaps

To remove the PCB from its cradle, you’ll have to detach a few things. First of all the 2 flaps on the left. Next are the “sides” where the touch-sensitive volume slider is. Lastly the other side where the prev/play/next buttons were. Both sides have a bit of PCB connected with ribbon cable so you can easily bend them without worrying you’ll break the entire PCB.

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Removed PCB

Removed PCB

Oxidation

Oxidation

After some messing around to remove the PCB (do take care as even if it can bend a little, the 3,5mm jack is lodged pretty hard into the plastic, make sure it’s loose before trying to “pull” on the PCB!

As you can see in the last image, do not use the MW600 for working out if you sweat! I used it for running and as you can see my sweat completely ruined parts of the contacts.

Whatever reason you had to take apart the MW600, I hope you found this guide useful, if you have any questions don’t hesitate to leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Jun 04

Kobo Touch or Sony PRS-T1?

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Lately I’ve been wondering if I should get a an eReader. I’ve been reading quite a bit and, being the tech person that I am, having a device the weight of not even half a book capable of storing millions of them sounds very interesting.

As I live in continental Europe, things such as a Kindle or Nook are hard to come by. Shops don’t sell them and the only place I know you can get them (fairly) easily is on eBay but with a hefty shipping cost ($20 or more). So my quest continued, I went to check out Coolblue’s eReader Store which I know always has a reasonable “Top Ten” list and good comparison features. There I found the Kobo Touch and Sony PRS-T1 (what were the marketing folks over at Sony thinking when they gave their device this name?).

The PRS-T1 currently costs 150 euros compared to the Kobo Touch’s 120. As for features, they are somewhat similar, the Kobo does not have audio playback but that’s usually not really an issue if you would like to read a book (unless you like audio books of course).

I went to the store and tested both of them for about an hour. My findings were kind of surprising. I didn’t know Kobo as a brand before so I figured Sony being the big corporation it is would probably have better hardware but this is not the case!

‘Flipping’ a page takes almost double as long on the Sony device than on the Kobo. I didn’t find a way to change the Sony’s ‘total refresh’ to fewer times than every single page. I set the Kobo to the maximum amount which seemed to be a refresh after every six pages. You don’t really need a refresh after every page so I’m not sure why Sony didn’t think of this (and if it’s there I couldn’t easily find it).

I also like the fact you can either swipe or just tap the left or right side on the Kobo to flip a page where the Sony only seems to work with a swipe or the physical next/back buttons. The fact the Kobo only has one button, Home, was quite appealing as well.

The user interface of the PRS-T1 was very cluttered in my opinion, one could argue the Kobo’s home screen lacks detail or features but in this case I prefer simplicity over crowded menus. A thing I do like about the Sony eReader is the fact you can change its orientation from portrait to landscape and back whenever you feel like it. This isn’t possible with the Touch, I’ve read you can only do this when reading PDF files, not with EPUB ones unfortunately.

I didn’t have the capability to test the web browsers as there was no WiFi available at the time of testing but then again, those are non-essential features on an eReader. I’d use it for reading books, and that’s about it. Integration with Goodreads.com or maybe a Twitter feed would’ve been nice but certainly not necessary.

As for the hardware, the Sony looks sleeker, the microSD slot has a dustcover which the Kobo lacks but the latter feels more comfortable to hold with the rubber-ish backside. They have about the same dimensions and have more or less equal mass.

Bottom line: both the Sony PRS-T1 and Kobo Touch are pretty good devices. If you’re more the kind of person who likes a sleek design and would like to play music or audio books the Sony reader is the machine for you. However, if you do not require audio I think the Kobo Touch is the better choice.

What are your thoughts on both devices? Post them in the comments and we can have some discussion about it.

Jan 04

Xperia Mini Pro First Impressions

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After three years of service I said goodbye to my Nokia 3500 Classic, which was almost falling apart anyway. Time to ‘go with the flow’ and get ourselves one of them fancy Android phones I thought. Settling for compactness and not wanting to spend a whole lot of money on the device I chose the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro (Azerty version). There seems to be quite a bit of confusing posts about this phone, thank Sony for the similar naming of their phones for that. It’s the one with just one physical button (home) on the front of the phone.

So first of all, as I opened the box I noticed some thought was put into the design of the box. The phone sitting in a cradle with all other stuff (booklets, USB/socket charger and headphones) underneath.

Challenge numero uno: Getting the backcover off
As this is a brand new phone I didn’t want to break anything right from the start so I tried to take great care while doing this. The image and description in the manual didn’t speak to me as much as a Google search. The trick is to just slide your nails in between the cover and the phone when you’ve ‘clicked’ it open a bit thanks to the little plastic opening at the left side of the phone.

Secondly, using the (horrible) PC Companion I wanted to update the firmware. Windows 7 apparently couldn’t install the driver required, a quick Google search for ‘S1Boot Download Driver’ brought me to a website that had the driver available. After the manual install it worked flawlessly.

Now the phone was ready for a test drive so to speak. One thing I immediately noticed was the piles of bloatware that was added. Took some time to remove all of it, sadly not all of the apps can be removed without rooting (yes PopCap, I’m looking -angrily- at you).

I have to say, I was quite overwhelmed at first with the many options, screens and fanciness that bombarded me. I can imagine a non-tech savvy person being turned off by this (that or he just doesn’t pay attention to it at all). After spending a couple of hours checking out all the different settings and apps/widgets that I had gathered I’m quite happy with my current setup.

Switching the media player to PlayerPro, browser to Dolphin HD and the ‘launcher’ to GO Launcher EX improved quite a bit upon the default ‘skin’. I have also yet to discover the full potential of the Tasker application, which can do a ridiculous amount of customization. However, the application (app drawer) section is a complete mess when you install a handful of them. At this point I haven’t found a fast way to sort them in tidy groups of related apps (besides putting them in folders that is).

The hardware side of things is quite pleasant. The physical keyboard takes some getting used to but I prefer it to the onscreen one nonetheless. The battery is another story, having used ‘dumbphones’ for nearly 10 years with a standby time of over 5 days this is quite a disappointment. By messing around with it for a couple of hours I managed to drain the battery from 100% to less than 50%. And right now, while being used only a little bit and being idle I see the battery getting drained quite a bit (a lot less than WiFi was on though). I’m guessing a charge overnight is no excess luxury.

Using Android instead of Nokia S40 as an OS surely is a richer experience, however, at the expense of battery lifetime, but the functionality you get in return outweighs this by far.

Update:
Started using JuiceDefender, which can periodically turn on wifi for a minute to sync and turn it back off, saving a lot of battery because this way wifi doesn’t have to be on all the time when you’re not actively using the connection.

Update 2:
A few days ago I couldn’t get the phone to connect in MTP mode anymore (mass storage worked fine), for some reason Windows 7 ‘forgot’ the driver and tried reinstalling it, but that failed. I’ve Googled a bit and found the quick and easy solution to this problem:

Here is the solution. Right My Computer and select properties. Goto device manager. And locate MTP USB Device. Right click and choose select update driver. Select ‘browse my computer for drivers’ and then choose “Let me pick drivers to install”. You will get two options select the USB controllers and click OK and you are done.