How to Disassemble Your Treo 650

Disassembly of the Treo 650 is relativly easy. Make sure you have a well lit workspace, with plenty of room to work in and a place to keep your tools and disassembled parts. I would avoid carpeted areas just in case you drop a screw or some other small part. Also, make sure your workspace is ESD safe and avoid getting up too often and increasing the possibilites of generating a static discharge and zapping your beloved treo.

The tools needed for the job are:

1. T5 torx driver
2. x-acto or sharp pointed device
3. paper cup (for small parts)

First of all, read the entire proceedure so you know what you are getting into. become very familiar with the proceedure and you you minimize the possibility of making a mistake.

The first step is to make sure your data is backed up just in case you encounter problems and need access to it later. After that, you should remove the battery cover and battery, and also do not forget to remove the SIM tray (if needed) and you might as well remove the memory card.

Place the Treo face down and remove the 7 torx screws as indicated by the black arrows in the picture. The torx screw for the antenna is longer than the rest, and sits below a rubber plug and tamper-evident label. It is indicated in the picture by the blue circle. Remove the rubber plug and label with your sharp knife carefully.

After removing all the screws, remove the antenna by pulling it straight out. Next up is the hardest step... spliting both halves of the case!

Start by holding the treo as shown below, work on separating the side that does not have the antenna. Place your left thumb where the red dot is and squeeze in. The front half of the case needs to be "pryed out" to unclip it from the other half. this is done by inserting your right thumbnail in between the halves (blue arrow) and running it down the split forcefully but slowly (yellow arrow).

Once you have progressed far enough along, it should look like the picture below.

Once you have that side split, go ahead and separate both edges by opening it up like a book... but do it very carfully and you should be able to unsnap and split the other side. As you can see from the picture below, the electronics and screen stay with the front half, and the rear half separates with the side chrome pieces

That is it to opening up your Treo. The next how-to's will show how to rubberize the chrome side pieces, add a lanyard, an internal impedance fix hack, and to add a 3.5mm audio out jack up top... cool!!!