On October 22, 2021, we dismantled one smartphone and one cell phone
of a team member.
Purpose of Dismantling
Experience the presence of metals in cell phones
Confirm a structure of cell phones
Smartphone
You can watch the dismantling on
The smartphone we are going to take apart is called 003SH, which was
manufactured by SHARP Corporation in 2010.
These older devices tend to be easier to dismantle than modern ones as
the parts can be more easily removed. In the same way, this smartphone
had a very easy structure to disassemble. First, insert your
fingernails from around the power terminal and remove the back plate.
You may have opened it before, because it is where you can insert the
SIM card or SD card and replace the battery. Release the lock, remove
the battery, and the SIM card and SD card inside. You can see some
screws, so use a special screwdriver (pentagonal screwdriver in this
case) to remove them. Then you can see the circuit board.
Because there are several components such as speakers and vibration
motors on the back panel, remove them as well. You can remove the
board by crushing and removing the small plastic projection that holds
the edge of the board.
The flexible cable that is connected to the display can be removed
from the connector of the end and most of it is just attached to the
board, so remove it from here. The silver parts attached to the board
are heat sinks, which can be removed by inserting your fingernail
under them.
Under the heat sink, there is often an IC chip that generates heat. It
was difficult to disassemble the board any more, so we decided to
finish with the board. Next, we dismantled the screen. By inserting a
flathead screwdriver from the speaker area on the front side of it,
you can remove the surface glass. After removing the glass, the LCD
module can be removed by pushing from the back side. It is layered and
can be peeled off. As a result, we were able to remove several pieces
of film that reflect light in complex ways, as well as the main body
of the LCD.
This is the end of dismantling the smartphone. Finally, we were able
to dismantle it into parts as shown in the picture below.
Feature Phone
You can watch the dismantling on
Dismantling a feature phone is similar to that of a smartphone
(although both were made a long time ago). The phone we are going to
take apart is called V603SH, which was made by SHARP Corporation in
2005.
Unlike smartphones, there are many hidden screws in feature phones.
They are hidden behind stickers, so in addition to the visible screws,
you have to find the stickers where the screws might be hidden and
remove them. Also, feature phones have hinges as moving parts, and the
parts are connected to those hinges by screws, which make it difficult
to be taken off. Other than that, it is similar to disassembling a
smartphone, so we will omit to explain about some parts. First, remove
the battery and SIM card.
Next, we need to remove the hidden screws. The black part in the
picture below is a sticker, and the screws are inside it. When you
insert a cutter, it will peel off and reveal the screws, so you can
use a screwdriver to remove them. The silver parts next to the screen
also came off.
There was also a screw at the top of the screen, so removing it
allowed you to remove the main body of the screen. By removing the
screws on the base, it can be divided into two halves, the top half
and the bottom half. *At this point, the top half looks like just a
circuit board since the screen has been removed.
Many flexible cables are also contained in the screen's circuit
board, so by removing them one by one, the base can be removed. Behind
the circuit board, there is the LCD unit, which could be dismantled
into film and LCD in the same way as the smartphone.
Next, we move on to disassemble the bottom half. Removing the screws,
the keyboard part splits in half.
There is also a circuit board here, and the rubber film used for the
keyboard can be removed from between the base and plastic. It sinks in
and allows electricity to pass through the circuit board, which is
what makes it work as a button. Unlike that of a smartphone, the
circuit board of a feature phone is assembled in a three-dimensional
shape in order to make buttons on the side work. This can be separated
into the circuit board and the hinge by removing the flexible cable as
well.
There is still a screw hidden here, so remove it and remove plastic.
Then, the hinge, which looks like a mass of metal, can be removed.
This is the end of dismantling the feature phone. Eventually, we were
able to remove the parts as shown in the picture below.
Thought over Dismantling
We do not usually dismantle a feature phone or a smartphone, so that
itself was a fun thing to do, but of course we learned a lot from it.
Smartphones that we use in our daily lives look like just a glass
plate (in our opinions), so we thought there would be nothing inside
but circuit boards, but when we actually did, we were very surprised
to see that there were more different types of parts used than we had
imagined, such as metal parts and flexible cables, in addition to
circuit boards. In addition to that, we needed a special pentagonal
screwdriver to dismantle phones, and although we were not used to it,
it took us more than two hours to finish dismantling it, which made us
realize that they were not easy to dismantle. We are planning to keep
the disassembled waste electronic devices as reference materials until
the end of the web contest, and after that, we will take a recovery
box to reassemble them.