Kindle Paperwhite - screen broken, or...?

[jimkrane]

Hi everyone.

A friend of mine has given me his Paperwhite to play with for the simple reason: doesn't work (that was the only description he gave me).

When I received it, there was an empty battery warning displayed, so I hooked it up to a phone wall charger (5V, 0.5A). After cca. half an hour, Kindle booted itself normally, displaying the homescreen. Then I realized the problem - display wasn't responding to my fingertips... I've left it to fully charge, amber light turned into green in about four hours. I've done a hard reset after disconnecting it from the charger, behaviour was still the same - whatever I touched, there was no response from the Kindle. Connecting it to a PC was also successful - it showed as an external drive immediately. I've deleted the Documents folder contents, unplugged it and homescreen updated itself a few seconds later (all titiles from the list were gone). That told me the Kindle is not frozen. As the last try of doing something, I've created empty DO_FACTORY_RESTORE file on the Kindle drive, rebooted it forcibly (holding power button for 30 seconds), and now I'm stuck at the following screen:



Kindle still doesn't react to touches, connecting it to a PC doesn't show external drive anymore.

I don't know if it's PW1 (very high probability it is) or PW2 (I'm only sure it's not PW3) as I never had the chance to enter the menus and still haven't opened it to check. I also don't know how the previous owner treated it or whatever happened to the device. There is no physical damage to the Kindle, at least not visible.

Based on my unfortunately not very informative post, is there anything that could be done to revive the device? Is there any possibility of / point in repairing it (this comes to mind)?

Thank you all for your time.

Kind regards,

Jim

[dordale]

Jim--
You can tell the differerence between a paperwhite 1 vs 2 by looking at the back--if the back says "kindle" then it's a PW1 if it says "amazon" it's a PW2.

That being said, either way, I'm sure you'll have to open it up if there is any hope of repairing it at all. It could be as simple as a loose connector somewhere inside. I don't know anything about Kindle innards, but I do know there are quite a few people on this forum who have opened their Kindles up--You might try searching the forum for other posts regarding unresponsive touch screens.

Good luck!

[jimkrane]

Thanks for the input, dordale. It's definitely PW1 ("kindle" on the back, also the disassembly confirmed that). As having nothing to lose, I've took Kindle apart and gave it a thorough cleaning (mostly dust).

If anyone would like to take a look (please), here's the few pictures:

PW1 disassembled

Nothing seems out of ordinary to my untrained eye except a detail on the last two pics. You can see the corrosion on one of the connectors on the first one and the damage I've done after cleaning the corroded part on the second.

Here are the cropped details of the male part (unfortunately I don't know if everything's fine inside the female connector on the motherboard, just couldn't see anything):





Could this possibly be the source of the unresponsiveness?

(still no screen response after assembly)

I'd conclude this with the question from the end of my first post...

Thanks and regards,

Jim

[jimkrane]

Well, I've managed to bring the touchscreen functionality back to life. I've simply trimmed the corrosion damaged connector with blade knife and it actually helped!



(This is not a final result, one more trimming took place after taking this pic to cut off the remaining damaged part of the connector.)

Cheers!

[soulfuldog]

Congrats on getting it to work again. Wonder how the connector got corroded in the first place?

[jimkrane]

Thanks! I really have no idea how the corrosion happened, as my friend swears he took good care of it prior to giving it to me as non-working...

[Sydney's Mom]

Good for you! Enjoy!