Have you ever dropped your phone in water? Given it a wash in the washing machine? How about given it a long soak in the bath? Well, I did the last one and thought my phone was toast.
Once I realized that my phone had been sitting in water for several hours, I didn’t even attempt to turn it on. I promptly popped that sim card, SD card and battery out and dried it with a towel. Then I blowed it dry with the low setting on the hair dryer for a short amount of time and finally plopped it into a bag of rice for two days.
After 48 hours of being without a phone, I decided that it was time to test the phone. DEAD! Wah! But wait! maybe the battery was just bad. Nope, spare battery didn’t work either. I put the original Samsung battery back in and plugged it into the wall. BAM! It started to charge. Yay!!
I waited another 30 minutes and then turned it on. Voila! Power! However, when I tried to make a phone call the other person couldn’t hear me. :*(
Since I didn’t want to have to use a headset for calls, I decided to follow these instructions and take the phone apart. After taking out all the tiny screws, I used a credit card (I didn’t want to use anything that could slip and scratch the screen) to slice apart the screen from the hardware. Boy those parts inside are really small! I went to take a picture of the experience and then realized I use my phone to take pictures. Duh! I really like the way this guide shows you at step 7 how to get to the inside of the phone
This video is also a good guide. I found it after I finished and put everything back together, but you may be able to stop taking apart your phone after the 1:37 section of loud speaker assembly. This may give you enough access to clean the mic.
To clean the mic, I dug around on the rubber holder and pinhole entry. No obvious dirt came out, but I decided to put it all back together and try a call again. Lo and behold they could hear me! This site will show a pic of where to clean the mic on the inside.
So to sum it up, I just wanted to let people know that there may be hope for your phone after all. If a non-technical person like me can manage to take apart a Galaxy S4, then anyone can. This is just another reason why I like Android over iPhone! (Although I did once cook an iPod Touch in the oven to dry it out, and it eventually worked again. It never was the same, though.)
Aimee Knows 