Repairing a Treo 270 / 180

It was a dark and dreary day in PDAville last summer when the cover of my precious Treo 270 snapped off. I still had the ability to use the phone with a headset, but that wasn't very convenient. So after months of my Treo collecting dust on my desk, I decided to find out if I could easily put the Treo 270 motherboard into a undamaged Treo 270 shell.

The first thing I did was remove the four screws on the back cover and then remove the screw under the sim card cover. At that point you can remove the cover. To my surprise, there were no solder points. The motherboard was connected to the flip cover by a connector the easily disconnected. The only other connection to the motherboard was the battery which is glued to the back of the case. After I peeled the battery away, the motherboard (the screen and motherboard are one piece) easily came out of the case.

The next thing I researched was if the Treo 270 and Treo 180 shell were the same. Luckily they were. The reason this was important is that I wanted to buy a non-working Treo on Ebay, but Treo 270s were more rare and much more expensive. Luckily I found an untested Treo 180 on ebay for $15. Once I received the Treo 180, I removed it's motherboard (which amazingly worked fine) and installed my Treo 270 motherboard. I then made a test call with no problems and it's been working great ever since.

So for $15 and 15 minutes worth of simple work, I salvaged a $400 investment. Maybe later I'll post a step by step tutorial up on the process, but my main point was to let you know that the Treo 270 is fixable for you handyman types. One thing to note is the Treo 300 is a different animal. While you can move a Treo 300 motheboard from one Treo 300 to another, you don't want to interchange a Treo 300 with a Treo 180 or Treo 270 since there is no sim card compartment on the 300. Good Luck!