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This page reviews an item that eMate owners have been waiting for for ages:
A replacement for the eMate’s display ribbon cable that will, unless you take the proper precautions in time, eventually be punctured by a hinge spring leg.
Congratulations if you have no idea what I am talking about. Obviously your eMate’s cable is still intact. Here are the instructions that you need to follow if you want to keep it that way, and here is an excellent description of the problem itself.

Well, since you have read on, I get the impression that you are interested in the announced review after all. So I won’t waste any more time and start right away!

By the way: Click on the images to bring up a higher resolution image in a new browser window.

As long as there was no replacement cable available, you basically had two options if your eMate was afflicted with the infamous ribbon cable problem. Either you tried to get a broken eMate for parts, or you tried to fix your cable.
Although the latter is not impossible, it requires both the skill and the equipment to solder very small traces of copper under a microscope. Traces enclosed in a cable that will happily melt away if the soldering temperature is a degree too high or if the soldering tip touches the cable for a second too long. If you do not have a soldering station that allows reducing the temperature to one only marginally above the melting point of soldering tin, you might just as well forget about fixing such a cable.
But even if you do have the equipment and can use it well, you are sometimes out of luck. In my experience about one out of five cables is so damaged that anything you could do would be a temporary fix at best. The worst cable I’ve ever seen had nine punctured traces. I didn’t even try to fix that one.
Small wonder that I was fairly excited when I found a brand-new replacement cable at eBay. I got in touch with the seller Ferdi Ozguner, and he agreed to send me a sample for the cost of shipping.

Said sample arrived via air mail a couple of days later in a plain padded envelope. Since you would have a very hard time breaking such a cable, this is sufficient packing as far as padding is concerned.

Inside the envelope the cable was wrapped in a paper sheet. I am aware that some are going to think “what a paranoid nit-picker” in a second, but I would have preferred some kind of waterproof bag around the cable. If you, like me, have ever seen a plain padded envelope that has spent ten days lying out in the rain because the postman didn’t put it properly into your mailbox while you were on a business trip, you know what I mean. A ziploc bag would add a lot of additional protection with next to no additional cost.
Being the picky pedant I am, I did of course point this out to Ferdi, and he assured me that all future cables will ship with more protection.

Fortunately, my fear that this cable might be some home-grown hardware hack turned out to be unfounded. As you can see, the cable (the top one in the picture) is professionally manufactured. At first sight you wouldn’t be able to distinguish it from the original cable.
Both cables are 0.37 mm (0.014’’) thick at the end (where the connectors are) and 0.13 mm (0.005’’) elsewhere.

There is one area where the thickness of the replacement cable is different from that of the original: Where the hinge spring usually hits. In this area the cable has an extra protection layer that brings the total thickness to 0.51 mm (0.02”) as opposed to the 0.37 mm (0.014’’) of the original cable.
Unfortunately, this excellent idea has been realized somewhat suboptimally. The top cable in this picture is one where I fixed the fourth and fifth trace from the left. This is the spot where the spring leg almost always hits. Unfortunately, this is also about where the replacement cable’s additional transparent protection layer ends.
Extending this layer another 3 mm to the left would be a significant improvement. Not that it would guarantee that the cable can never be destroyed again. Depending on how fast you open your eMate the spring leg can press against the cable with amazing force. But if the endangered area was fully covered with the additional protection layer, this might well be the difference between noticing the problem in time and noticing it too late.

In the area we are currently talking about the cable is folded over on itself. In other words, there are two cable layers on top of each other. What you see here are another three traces that the spring leg managed to puncture. By the time it got there, it had already worked its way through the opposite layer (which accounts for the two broken traces shown in the image above).
The fact that the black layer extends to the left is probably not meant as an additional protection against puncture. The spring leg will come from the opposite side and puncture both layers before it arrives at the black layer.
It would be a good idea to add an additional protection layer between the two cable layers, though. At least the side of the cable we are looking at right now would be better protected that way. This is what I normally do when I fix a cable. You can see the yellow edge of the additional inner layer lurking out at the bottom right-hand side.

The contacts of the replacement cable (bottom) are gold-plated as they should be. There is no visible quality difference to the original cable’s contacts apart from one very tiny one: The original cable is ever so slightly wider than its replacement.
At the time this picture was taken, I didn’t think this fact would make any difference. However, I soon learned that I was wrong.

So far, so good. Since display ribbon cables are generally of no use whatsoever as long as they are lying on one’s table smiling into one’s camera, I intended this particular cable to serve an excellent purpose soon. I was going to install it in my own eMate which, shame on me, had never been opened so far. What a good opportunity to re-grease the hinges and add the washers...
Stupid, isn’t it? For years I’ve been tirelessly explaining to everyone who asked (and a fair number of people who didn’t), the importance of taking care of the hinge spring problem in time, but I’ve never found the time to do this to my own eMate.
Just in case you have no idea how to get your eMate apart, here are disassembly instructions.

The cable fits perfectly on the side where the main logic board will soon be... 

...and also on the display side.

When I powered my eMate on after replacing the cable, it presented me with the usual pen alignment routine. Imagine my surprise when it showed no reaction whatsoever to pen input. The digitizer seemed to be as dead as a doornail.
Wondering if I was already senile enough to make such a stupid mistake, I checked that I hadn’t accidently put in one of my punctured cables. This, thank God, was not the case.
Assuming that the cable had been tested before it was sent, I considered it fairly unlikely that it might have any shorts or broken traces. Hence I expected to find the problem somewhere in the area where the connectors are.

As I mentioned above, the original cable is a little wider than its replacement, the result of which is that the latter can be slightly displaced when you insert it in the connector. This problem exists on both ends of the cable. However, it is more pronounced at the end that is plugged into the display unit’s connector. It wasn’t easy to capture this with my camera, but I think you will get the idea. The left image shows the cable in the bottommost possible position, the right one shows it in the topmost possible position. If you manage to lock the connector while the cable’s contacts aren’t exactly aligned with the  connector’s contacts, some connections might not be established.
Of course I pointed this problem out to Ferdi, and he assured me that it would be taken care of if he ever had a chance to produce a second run.

In my case it was sufficient to unlock the connector, realign the cable ever so slightly and lock it again. My eMate has been working fine ever since..

Some words on cost and warranty...

The cables will change owners at 49.00 USD each. Shipping to anywhere in the world is included. Since shipping worldwide is more expensive than shipping within Canada, Canadians will pay 2.50 USD less. Ferdi does not not normally ship these cables via surface mail because it might take an unreasonable amount of time for a shipment to arrive. I can confirm this, the longest time a surface shipment from the USA ever took to reach me in Germany was two months and five days. However, he is willing to ship any way you want, but make sure you get in touch with him first to work out the details.
Each cable comes with a full lifetime warranty against manufacturer’s defects. Although admittedly this sounds very reassuring, I wouldn’t be the pedant I am if I hadn’t asked what exactly this is supposed to mean. Ferdi guarantees that after you send a defective cable back at your expense he will send you a new cable if it turns out that the defect isn’t your fault. Defects that occur due to wrong installation or hinge spring leg puncture will always be considered your fault and are not covered by the warranty. Which, I might add, makes perfect sense. If, while the eMate is disassembled anyway, you do not install the washers to prevent this, you deserve no better...
In case all cables happen to be sold, Ferdi will refund the purchase price minus shipping cost.

The good news is that you are eligible for one of two possible discounts.
Ferdi will allow you a deduction of 3.00 USD per cable if you mention that you found the cable through this web site. Just click for a pre-configured mail template. I won’t benefit in any way from it.
Donating at least 5.00 USD (of course you are welcome to donate more) per cable to NewtonTalk, which is the better option in my humble opinion, will not only support the Newton community’s strongest source of help and information, but also get you a 9.00 USD discount per cable. After you have made your donation using PayPal, just send Ferdi a copy of PayPal’s confirmation mail (with all your private data removed) along with your .