Droid Mini - what did I do to my wifi?

July 15, 2016 5:40 PM

I took apart my Droid Mini to replace the battery. Now the wifi doesn't work. Help!

I decided to be bold and replace my failing Droid Mini battery on my own. Which seemed to go fine, except now the wifi isn't working properly. Specifically, it isn't automatically gathering a list of networks, and the range is significantly diminished. I can, however, connect to my home network via my saved networks.

I'm assuming that I inadvertently loosened or damaged something -- but which part? Is this fixable? I can't seem to find any tutorials online about what to do, and I'm hesitant to restart surgery without having an idea of what I'm looking for. Thanks for any help!

posted by veery to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Here's a picture of the Droid Mini with the back off. Does that look similar to what you had?

Those two small white connectors up front look like they are the important antenna connectors. Those probably need to be really secure to get wifi and other radios working right. (The NFC antennae are the orange spirals in the middle of the phone)
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:06 PM on July 15, 2016

Response by poster: False alarm -- after playing around a bit, it's working again, and happily I didn't really even need to disassemble it again. The issue seems to have just been that I didn't have the antenna properly situated. It was a used phone to begin with, and didn't have the antenna taped down as the tutorial had indicated. But now it's taped, which appears to have solved the problem. Hurrah!
posted by veery at 6:55 PM on July 15, 2016