Samsung Captivate repair/de-moisturizing

Well, it finally happened.  I spilled tea all over my phone.  The speaker sounded horrible and the signal from the headphone jack was very weak.


My cat-like reflexes appear to have staved off most of the damage: After taking the battery out and quickly towling off the phone I put it in a bag of rice.  About two hours later I restarted the phone.  Speaker sounded great, but the headphone jack wouldn't recognize when something was plugged into it.  For example, if I plugged in a set of headphones the speaker continued playing and nothing came out of the headsets.


Thanks to this post I was able to dismantle the phone and found some moisture still up by the speaker and headphone jack.  I felt certain I would bust either the screen or one or more of the plastic snaps that hold the phone together, but I got lucky.


I removed some moisture in the area of the speaker and put the unsheathed screen/motherboard piece back in the bag of rice.  After another two hours the headset jack worked great!


I almost bought a replacement headphone jack on eBay, but I'm glad I didn't have to do an install -- looks like I'd have had to further dismantle components on the board.

Tether the Samsung Captivate running Gingerbread (2.3)

Using the Gingerbread Ultimate ROM I was able to get my phone to serve as a wireless access point for my Windows XP laptop and to provide connectivity via tethering.
I was impressed with the ease of use and pretty pleased with the speeds.  I didn't have to do anything special to get this work.  Just followed the instructions in the Android 2.3 manual for the Nexus S.  One hiccup: I did have to restart my laptop after untethering before I could get the connection back.  Note: I'm getting HSPA instead of 3G most of the time.  


Here are the speedtest.net stats:
Captivate as Wireless AP (phone connected to network HSPA but not WiFi)
download: 2.06 mbps
upload: 0.58 mbps
ping: 346
Captivate on WiFi tethered to PC

download: 9.06 mbps

upload: 2.46 mbps

ping: 43

Captivate on HSPA tethered to PC

download: 3.16 mbps

upload: 1.20 mbps

ping: 159