This all started when I was accompanying a friend from Los Angeles to a beach front in Half Moon Bay. We had a good time lying on the sand, playing with the waves, and dragging seaweed and jellyfishes out of the rising tide. Then it happened, a super wave came on suddenly, and, you guessed right, soaked my pants with my N75.

At first I thought it was nothing and handed it to a friend so she can safekeep it in her purse. It was not until after we got home at night when I realized my cellphone keyboard was messed up: When I press 2, it shows 7.

So I got a torx 6 screwdriver and opened my cell phone, only to see some VLSI chips lying around. Nothing seems abnormal, I cleaned up the inside, blow-dried a bit with a hair blower, and reassembled everything back to where they were. As expected, this didn't fix my problem.

I turned to software. The first thing I did was to figure out what keyCode my keyboard is sending back. To do that, I created a J2ME program that reads key strokes and prints out the keyCode it gets. This program is now part of the downloadable Keyboard Magic jar file. Here's what I got:

 KeyPressed   KeyCode
 0          -50 / 48
 1           49
 2           50 / 55
 3           51
 4           52
 5           53
 6           54
 7           50 / 55
 8           56
 9          -32 / 57

It seems like keys 2 and 7 are stuck together, and 0 was stuck together with some other keys.

Then comes a full-blown KeyboardMagic which allows me to keep dialing numbers with this broken keyboard. Here's a brief introduction of how it works

To try out the KeyboardMagic and add some fun to your cellphone. Download Keyboard Magic