My Samsung Galaxy S4 took a bath

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.)

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SNB files are evil, which means that Samsung sucks monkey balls

Why Samsung can’t just make snb files work with other programs is beyond me. If you don’t know what an snb file is, you are lucky……..but I’ll tell ya anyway. Samsung has a note taking program called S-Memo. While traveling, I thought this would be a good program to use for my journal writing as I could easily export the files to Drive, so when I took my daily trip notes, they could easily be backed up without having to always be connected to the Internet. Well, I was wrong.

Finding a program that could read S-Memo files on the PC is next to impossible. I Googled and Googled but couldn’t find an easy (or any) solution. Originally, I exported all the files directly to Drive expecting to be able to simply open and edit them but found that neither Drive nor any program on my PC could open the files. Finally by searching around on the Internet, I found that I could export from S-Memo under the “MyFiles” tab to either jpg, pdf or snb.

So obviously neither jpg or snb would be helpful as I wanted to edit my notes. I thought PDF was an option because on my computer, I have the full version of Adobe Acrobat. Unfortunately, this is not a real solution as the conversion basically gives you crap that you then have to decipher and put into actual words – much more work than just starting from scratch.

Overall, S-Note is a completely useless program and I will end up just reading my notes from my phone and will retype them.