9810 Keyboard replacement question

**Roveer** · 06-18-2012, 01:12 PM

I had posted a few messages here recently about upgrading my 9800 to a 9810 or a 9900. I got lucky and a friend had a 9810 that he was no longer using so today I swapped my 9800 over to it. Took a while, but now I've got everything there including my BES.

One problem with the 9810 though is that the keyboard on upper left side is a bit mushy/crunchy and not nearly as responsive as the rest of the keyboard. Not unusable, but a little disturbing.

Questions. Can I replace this keyboard? Is it the exact same one as the 9800? (I could pull the one out of my 9800 and put in the 9810? Is it really hard to do? Any recomendations on where to get a replacement keyboard.

I'm thinking if I can fix this one up, I'll just hang with it until the BB 10 phones start coming out and decide if I want to use my upgrade on one of those.

**Roveer** · 06-18-2012, 10:39 PM

OK, I post of a lot of responses to my own posts in the hope that it helps others.

I spent a good part of the day today researching the 9810 keyboards what I ended up doing was taking apart my 9810 and 9800 and swapping the keyboard portion.

You'll find disassembly guides on youtube but most stop at a certain point and concentrate on the slider/screen portion. None that I found showed how to seperate the keyboard.

You end up prying up a number of heat molded plastic pieces to remove the top holding portion of the keyboard. The only good thing is, even know you are basically breaking these clips, the frame holds the entire piece down so it doesn't really matter.

Once you have seperated the top piece then you have the actual keys which are on a adhesive plastic (this is what the problem was for me), this piece was bad and was making a crunching sound. Drove me crazy. Underneath that is the actual keyboard switches on an adhesive layer with a copper piece beneath. This piece also has the connector on it. I did not need to replace this. So I swapped the keyboard piece with my 9800, put it all back together again and I'm happy with my now quiet 9810.

Be advised that you can find some of these pieces on Ebay although some of them will need to come from Hong Kong.

Roveer