My cell phone ticks like a watch!!

It's nothing really, but my Nokia N95 phone ticks. It sounds like a moderately expensive watch (not really loud, but you can definably hear it when held up to your ear). My friends have heard it and agree it's weird. I've had the phone about 3 months and only noticed it a week ago. Just think it's strange that a reasonably good phone should tick like a bloody wristwatch.

I know a reasonable amount about electronics and just can't figure out what it could be. I'm going to dissect it on the weekend just to see. I can keep the power on and find what component is making this noise.

Anyone here want to take a guess what it will be? I'm interested to see if we can figure out what it is before I take the phone apart.

A short of some kind, maybe a insect trapped inside, a listening device. Or like the Simpsons episode where a japanese guy sneezed into the box at assembly, and everbody got sick when they opened it.

My guess is some malfunction or interference that triggers the tick.

Intereference-wise:
Just like PC-speakers that suddenly start to beep when someone's about to receive a phone call xd.

Or when a TV is turned on with a LCD monitor nearby, the screen might suddenly morph for a split second.

And malfunctions could always cause strange stuff to happen (like ticking)

reply to post by shamus78


My guess is that it's a bad capacitor.

Do you have the time set to digital display or analog display? If set to analog it could be a sound Nokia added for the effect of a wristwatch. Cell phones have all kinds of sounds recorded in them at the factory for different settings.

It's a bomb !!!

The ticks, are they constant or irregular? Are they coming from the speaker, if so then you prob'lly have a leaky cap.

I have a Nokia N93 and it ticks when I use the optical zoom on the Cam.

An old video card can cause this, PCI soundcard as well as a broken capacitor. What type of phone are you using?

Nokia N95 with Symbian 3rd edition. I have flashed the phone and installed a home-brew version of the operating system rather then the standard Nokia Symbian op system. The noise existed before I modded it.

It's not coming from a speaker (I have an app that completely unpowers all speakers and non-core functions). It's definably more of a physical sound, exactly like a wristwatch.

The sound is very regular, exactly like a wristwatch, with each tick seeming to last very close to one second.

I'm going with capacitor, although it's really just a guess from me (and I would expect the rate of ticking to be faster based on the frequency of the capacitor in question).

Maybe the lens shutter? Although there's no movement, it could be something shorting out. Then again, I've never had any problems with this phone, and I've modded the heck out of it. If it was a faulty component, I would expect the Nokia to have died at least once in the last couple of months.

No outside interference. Even when I'm at work (in a vineyard, 50kms away from nearest town) I still get the noise. Fault tracing will tells me that it's something inside the phone, unaffected by external variables.

I'm looking for diagnostic software that will tell me the draw and load of each component, but as yet (thanks to the stupid, stupid symbian operating system) I've yet to find anything low level enough for me to do this.

I'm not really too worried if I brick the phone, so I'll still be taking it apart this weekend.

I know it's nothing sinister, I'm just interested in finding the answer.

www.n95users.com...

Nothing is wrong with your phone.

It's the RAM or Flash.

All the little electrons hit transistors that feed out to parts of the given ticking part of your phone and pass through them 1 time or 0 times every 1 x transistor x electronic storage devices for binary computation (littttttttle tiny capsules) @ roughly 70-90% the speed of light.

So, you get all this electricity going through these little switches this fast, it's bound that one of the parts we're made in China for .002 cents an hour, and sound wacky. =D

Nothin abnormal. I'm willing to bet it has to do with RAM or Flash, anything that deals with switches.

I wouldn't believe it is the CPU given the fact the CPU has a constant stream of randomized 0s and 1s, where as anything that has to do with storing data has to do more switching, CPU feeds everything like a conduit for the rest of the circuit board.

(I'm about 70% accurate on my little explanation....given the fact I probably didn't name certain things the way they work, I'm a software kind of guy not the best with micro-architecture.)



[edit on 12-5-2009 by Revolution-2012]