samsung feature phone

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teardown xscale270 GT c-3590

 

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I had a little play and while the screws on the display & camera 'shell' of the thing are simply 1mm Phillips screwdrivers. Even when fully unscrewed, they still need a pair of needle-nose pliers to extract them. They go back in FINE.
The 5 screws on the keypad shell are a smaller size. Since they are quite recessed, it may be difficult unless you use very small needle-nosed pliers or an old trick I learned while opening NES cartridges in the 80s (out demos were on EPROMs ). Get a VERY fine soldering-iron head (like 0.5mm) and use it to heat the screws. The screws then expand, pushing the thermally softened plastic outwards. After that, They were so loose, needle-nosed pliers could be used to unscrew them. I replaced with standard 1.2mm screws as replacement so, in future, anyone could open them very easily.
I'm certainly not giving up and hope to get you some pictures up in the next week. I guess you realized that a 416MHz CPU (Xscale is basically an ARM CPU with Intel's MMX SIMD extensions). Finding stuff on the built-in 2700G video chip might be a bigger job BUT this smart phone would surely manage MP3/AAC/ACELP and such with no issue. I still wonder how many people spent £100s on a smartphone JUST because it was also an MP3 player.

If anyone with more experience would chip in, I would be willing to get the GNU compiler, assembler (I would still optimize all the CPU-hogging stuff into ASM) and a debugger working.

I know this isn't a total answer, but I've always felt gutted that nobody tears down feature phones. In Africa, they are 95% of the market.