Friday, March 3, 2023

Fixing a Cheap Mobile JELLY CASE

 I had to get a Japanese Phone after moving to Japan, but still find my old SAMSUNG J3 useful as a tiny pocket tablet around the home over WiFi.  It is much smaller, lighter and easier to type on than my AQUOS sense 4 lite. The J3 is ancient Android 5, so most apps have stopped working, unless you go back to the initial version. Jailbreaking it may be something to do in the future to put a current version on it. 

The keyboard on the new AQUOS is terrible and so error prone, even when extending the blank areas around each key of the Android keyboard app. The screen is just a bit too narrow. So the J3 still has its uses.

Always kept a JELLY CASE on the J3, but they eventually rot, crack, and fall apart. This is the 3rd JELLY CASE for the J3 I have bought. This new one was 600円 on eBay, free postage from China.


After putting it on, I immediately noticed it was faulty around the buttons on the sides of the phone. Couldn't actually turn the phone on and off, and it seemed to randomly press the buttons.


Same deal for the two volume buttons on the left side. Strange I thought, as this is not right for these cases at all. So looking closely at inside the button area of the case, you see there is a block of additional material on the inside of each case button that really shouldn't be there to operate like the previous JELLY CASES did.

So with a few minutes with a small engraving tool in a Dremel tool, I removed this  ADDITIONAL BUTTON MATERIAL from inside each case button.  

It works properly now.  

I wonder if this is a batch of test cases, or the tooling used to make it is multipurpose, and the additional material was incorrectly put in this batch of J3 cases, and the duds were sold off cheap. 

Will never know, but after my modification, I have the phone in a case again. 

So all good

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