Nokia 3310 teardown takeaways
The Nokia 3310. It's hard to think of a more iconic cell phone. I never had one as a kid; they were a few years before my time. But their legacy lives on, along with a shocking quantity of devices. If you've never taken one apart, it's a real trip. Nokia designed them for disassembly and reassembly. Compared to the repairability of a modern disposable mobile device, it's staggering how easy these things are to work on. All of the connections to the motherboard use spring contacts. While working on them, you won't encounter FPC cables, finicky connectors, or opportunities to lift solder pads.
The idea of a major manufacturer designing a mobile phone like this today is nearly unthinkable. There are many reasons for this. The two I want to highlight are competitive pressure for miniaturization and cost savings. Spring contacts add thickness to the device and are more expensive than FPC cables. An even cheaper option than an FPC cable is integrating everything onto the same board. This option is correspondingly worse for repairability.
A side effect of Nokia designing their devices like this is that they can continue to benefit society even after 2G network operators shut them out of the cellular network. Rather than building an entirely new hardware platform, makers can build a new mainboard for a device like a 3310 using the existing display, antenna, and I/O capabilities, which I'm doing for one of my upcoming projects.
A few photos of the mainboard layout follow, and I will release a KiCad footprint shortly for those who want to make custom mainboards for this platform.
