Tag Archives: hack

Revive an old Samsung Galaxy S3

I have an old Samsung Galaxy SIII (S3) that has been collecting dust in my closet. Its batter has swollen to alarming size and as a result it won’t ever turn on (even when plugged in.) I wondered if I could bypass the battery completely and it turns out you can! Thanks to xda forums I was able to hack this old phone to get it to work again.

Here’s the trick:

  • Look on the battery for + and – signs. These correspond to the positive and negative terminals on the battery prongs on the phone.
  • Grab any USB cable and cut the micro-usb end off of it. Strip away the shielding until you get the four smaller wires: red, green, white, black. Ignore white and green, we’re interesting in black and red (power)
  • Carefully strip the plastic sheath around red & black wires, and solder them to the battery terminal to the phone (be careful to line up the red wire with + and the black wire with – )
  • Profit! Once you’ve soldered red & black into their appropriate terminals you can plug the other end of the USB cable into a power source and turn the phone on!

Caution: Plugging something that provides power into the MicroUSB port will cause the phone to attempt to charge your “battery.” In my case this was pretty disastrous as the usb cable  got REALLY hot very fast. Not recommended.