[Ed. note: Larry originally wrote this article for the Palm Is Life forum, but he has also translated it for posting here. To see this article in the original Chinese, click here. Happy Hacking!]
When the Palm Treo 650 launched, it came with an earpiece issue; its speaker sound was too low for regular people to hear. How bad is it? Well, you could clearly hear the caller’s voice in a quiet room, but you probably couldn’t hear a honeybee flying around your ear while outdoors – even if you have turned your Treo 650 to the loudest level.
Later Palm Inc. released newer firmware to make the sound level of the earpiece receiver louder. However, unlike geeks, regular people may not know how to update their Treo 650 to fix bugs. Further, upgrading the firmware can be risky since doing so may result in repair charges not covered under warranty if the ROM flashing process fails. I guess a lot of users will leave the volume problem either because they don’t know how to fix it, or they are afraid of the update firmware process.
GoTreo Software Inc. must have heard the outcry from Treo 650 users, so they released the software called (Now the latest version is called “VolumeCare Pro“)
As the web page shows, VolumeCare will break the Sound Barrier on your Treo! You will now hear people loud and clear. As GoTreo Software promised, VolumeCare does increase the earpiece sound to an incredible level; believe it or not, it can even beat the hands free speaker on your Treo! 😯
And that’s the problem; you can always hear a really loud voice with distorted sound quality when VolumeCare is working hard on your Treo 650. But we don’t know what will happen when full driving power is always passing through the ear speaker so that it can be as loud as you need. Will it hurt the earpiece speaker of your Treo 650? The answer is probably “YES”, since there have been several cases in Taiwan where the ear speaker finally died.
You could send a Treo 650 with an expired warranty back to Palm Inc for repair service. But do you really think it is worth the $179US you would have to pay to have it repaired? That’s why I decided to do it myself, and here are the instructions:
Disassemble the phone set, locate the earpiece receiver then remove it.
This is the location where the original receiver sat.
In this case I got a receiver from another brand Smartphone as the replacement. Apparently the original part has two metal contacts and the replacement comes with two wires. It is necessary to connect these two wires to the main board by soldering.
Insert the receiver to the proper location.
Another close-up…
Put all things back and then finish assembling for the Treo, and luckily it will work properly again!!!
Oh!… forgot to tell you how much it all costs? Well, including parts and tools it’s less than $50US! 🙂