Something I have been waiting for ages to do! My Treo 650 was running non stop without any problems untill I dropped and its antenna came of. Still I could fit back the antenna and it went on working.
The Story: A dearth of parts here in India is the problems I faced. The phone is sturdy and nothing has happened other than me breaking the antennae which was pocking out. My search for an antenna took all over the world for the past 6 months. In the end I concluded I had to wait for someone from US to get me one when they are coming home. Meanwhile my phone antennae was portable - I could remove and fit it back. But also with such convenience came the realisation that one could also loose it.
Hardly anything in ebay.in for Treo 650. Also phones sold for Palm in India were models of Treo which came after the iconic Treo 650 - mostly windows based. A month back I had to go back into office - since I my antenna had fallen of somewhere.
An then a seller in China through eBay and came to my rescue. But it was not economical shipping only the antenna - so I decided to place an order to ship a whole new Treo case along with antenna, new keys and stylus. Cost me Rs 1500/-. I was skeptical until the product reached me. I placed the order since the seller was a very reputable Power Seller on ebay.com. It took two weeks and I sighed a relief, for the seller was not communicating at all. I got an email from the seller and also the product on the very same day. Wondering if email from china takes that long :-P The casing looked perfect and stylish in new colors. There were two accessories - Torx screwdriver and plastic lock remover - nice and handy stuff to have. Sure my star driver would not have fitted the puropse.
Rest is history : searched google which gave a step by step, pic by pic process of how to dimantle the phone and case. Eagerly removed it part by part and I found the phone was completely dismantled just for the sake of changing the casing! I just happened to scroll down to the comments in the Help post - and I found a person commenting - "you should never try such things since my PDA screen stopped working once I tried this". OMG - By this time I had removed and put back the display. So I connected the battery to check if phone is till working. And luckily the display lit up and phone was working indeed. I explored each part of the phone and what was what. I was surprised to see that the Vibration component was actually a micro motor that roltated a spindle which gave the phone vibrations in silent mode. I fitted all the locks and came down to putting the final screws in - I was really stuck with the screwed. It did neither fit the torx nor my start screw crivers. I had to put back my good old casing screws only. Next - the stylish metal and platic combination stylus would not fit in - I had to put back the old plastic one itself. Other than this everything went back in perfectly.
Now - did I miss something - How could I - the main part was sleek new black antenna which fitted in and looked hopefully never to break and come off again. All of these you could make out from the below pics also.
Such long post- I better stop - Hope it helps someone searching for a case.
