Dr. Cheap's House of Hacks

Nokia 8260 LED

Circa 2001

I a Nokia 8260, it was a tiny little phone, especially for 2001 models. Like most other cell phones you can barely read the display in the dark (same goes for the numbers on the keypad). The reason for this is that they use some super-cheap, dim, green LEDs inside. So I bought 2 strips of super bright surface mount LEDs from someone on eBay, half blue and half white. And then I went to work...

The Tools The Setup Keypad Closeup Phone Pieces Blue! Blue and White!
Blue!

Taking the phone apart was easy, only about 7 screws holding 9 pieces together. My official combination LED polarity-determinator/tester was a couple of AA batteries with some wires soldered onto them. My protection from death-by-alligator-clip-teeth was some torn up pieces of paper. The biggest PITA was that white stuff on the keypad...it got really gooey when it was heated up or I bumped it with the iron tip. Lots of clean-up breaks.

These surface mount LEDs are really really tiny, about 0.8mm long. Really hard to work with, espeically with unsteady hands and a soldering iron not made for stuff this small. It took me about 9 hours to complete this swap of 12 LEDs. The ones for the display lay on their sides, which makes it even more exciting to solder them on.

The brightness and added contrast of black on bright white vs. black on dim green made this very easy to read. To give you an idea of just how BRIGHT this display is...it doubles as a halfway decent flashlight in the dark! I really think cell phones should come with white displays like this to begin with, so what if they cost and extra $10.00 or so, it's worth it. Of course, now that new phones are starting to come out with full color displays, this whole problem should go away soon.

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