For a change I'll be writinig this up in English. Just to practise my mad language skillz a bit!
No, really it's because I think this might be interesting to a lot of people who might not necessarily be fluent in German. Beware, though: My English has seen better days!
Today I'll be replacing the battery in my old Umi Plus smart phone. Actually, I'll just be removing it; ordering a new one and sticking it in this phone may take a while, but I'll be publishing both articles only one day apart. So this one will be in my prepared articles list for a while.
You may ask: "Why replace the battery at all? That thing is like 5 years old!" Yes, it's true, this thing is so out of date, it's practically a doorstop at this point. But I have a second SIM card for business calls and I don't like having it in my private phone, although it would support dual sim. At the moment I have it in my even older Nexus 4, but with the deactivation of UMTS in Germany I need something a bit more modern supporting LTE. Which I think the Umi does. I hope! I never used it with LTE before, the card I had before didn't support it.
I bought my current Xiaomi a bit more than a year ago, in part because the battery of the Umidigi was dying quite fast. At the end the phone would turn off around the 60% mark. It has been lying around for a year after that and when I charged it up, the battery started to bulge. It got so bad that it pried open the back cover from the inside. I really thought this thing would explode any minute now, so I decided to remove the battery as soon as possible and get it to a recycling center. Which I did in early August. I have been waiting for the replacement since then. About 20€ including shipping from inside the EU, the listing said. Well...
But first, some disassembly was required: I used a box cutter to pry open the plastic covers on the top and the bottom of the back side to get at the screws. There are six screws of three different dimensions, which I find somwhat annoying. I had to get a pad and note down which one goes where: On the top there are two short ones to the left and right and a longer one with a small washer in the middle, a bit to the left; while at the bottom there are three screws of the same size, the longest of all of them.
By this point the back popped off all on its own, because of the swollen battery that obviously wasn't doing so good. By the way, in the the following picture you can see why this thing has practically no GPS reception: Half the contacts for antennas are not used or use just one pad on the front panel! Quite a strange thing to see... With the screws being as loose as they were there probably was no contact half the time, no wonder I couldn't get any decent location! We'll see if that gets better once I reassemble this thing! There are some hacks floating around the internet, but I'm not sure what to make of them.
But back to the disassembly: After opening the phone I was confronted with a black plastic shield thingy that I had to remove to get to the contacts for the battery. There are five screws holding it in, the four on both sides are the same size, the middle one is a bit longer. I actually put the outer and the inner screws into separate film containers so I won't lose or confuse them when I reassembly that thing. Oh, and the plastic buttons that fell out of the frame I put in there, too. What a strange construction.
The battery was taped down in several spots and I was barely able to get it out without ripping the foil it s packed in. Something I was very keen on avoiding, who knows how much damage is inside that thing. Modern li-po batteries are supposed to be non explosive but after all the burning Samsung phones a few years back I'm not so sure anymore. When I finally got it out I was quite happy to see it wasn't leaking or anything. Though it smelt funny, a bit like cleaning agent, a smell that dissipated quite quickly. I think it came from the adhesive used to glue down the battery.
And now it's time to put the new battery in and get the whole shebang reassembled! Let's see how that goes.
