Anatomy of a Nokia 6360

So now that my wife has a new Nokia 3200, I thought I’d disassemble the old phone and see if I could make it work reliably again. I figure cell phones can’t have that many parts inside, so it’s probably just a matter of tightening or reseating any connections between boards.
So let’s see what’s in this thing.
This is the Nokia 6360, albeit a rather beat up one.

We begin our dissection by carefully removing the dorsal cover to expose the battery. The battery is a standard issue 3.6V 900mAh Li-ion battery that Nokia claims to deliver 5 hours talk and 12 hours standby time.


After removing the battery, we see there are 4 Torx screws that need to be removed to take the back cover off. A suitably sized hex wrench can be used to remove the screws if a Torx screwdriver is unavailable.
There is a compartment at the bottom which looks like it might be used to contain something, but it’s empty.

When the screws are removed the front cover pops off exposing the button pad and LCD screen. I’m guessing the small rubber circle at the base of the phone is the microphone. The speaker is actually embedded in the top cover and connects to the main board via two circular contact pads above the LCD screen.

Looking down the top of the phone we see the power switch and the two LEDs used for infrared beaming.

There are two additional screws above the LCD screen that need to be removed in order to extract the main board. Two clips at the base of the phone also serve to restrain the main board. Carefully press these out and the bottom section of the main board can be slid out. Don’t push too hard or you’ll break the clips.


The top portion of the main board contains what appears to be the radio components of the cell phone. I would guess that the perforated metal cover serves as an RF shield for the radio bits.

There are three prominent ICs on the bottom portion of the main board, along with the power and main connector, battery terminals and several contact pads. The two rectangular contact pads closest to the battery terminals are used for the vibrating alarm. Two contact pads on the opposite side of the main board connect to a small square object embedded in the back plate with the vibrating alarm. I have no idea what this object does.

There is a peculiar chunk of plastic type material at the top of the phone in the back section. There is a silvery paint on it and it contacts the main board in two places: just below the IR LEDs and and at the side of the main board opposite the little nubby thing. This would appear to be the actual antenna for the phone. Quite a bit different that I thought it would look like.


Since there was nothing to reconnect or reseat (everything connects via contact pads), the only thing to do was just clean off the contact pads, reassemble the phone and make sure all the screws were tight so that everything makes good contact. After doing that, the phone seems to operate reliably once again.