Hands-on with an iPod Battery Replacement Kit

I've been known to dig up a screwdriver and open the occasional DVD player when, say, a disc gets jammed in the tray, but prying open an iPod with a little screwdriver has never seemed like a good idea to me. Yet here is Blue Raven Technology with its new series of DIY iPod battery replacement kits, which promise to help you swap in a new battery for your player. I gave it a shot myself yesterday, and guess what? It worked, but my iPod's lovely shell suffered some ugly dings in the process. Ugh.

The $30 Blue River kit is pretty straightforward: you get a replacement battery for the iPod of your choice (in my case, a first-generation 5GB iPod, but note that Blue Raven does make a kit for the Nano), a tiny screwdriver, and a green plastic tool for prying the case open. The first step is to take the screwdriver and "gently" shove it between the iPod's front and back covers. Now, if you recall, the front cover of the original iPod is surrounded by a layer of clear plastic enamel, and while trying to, uh, gently insert the screwdriver in the tight seam, I took several digs out of the plastic. Sure, the enamel was a bit scuffed up already, but I was pretty bummed that I'd dinged up the casing so noticeably.

Anyway, the next step is to work the green plastic tool inside the seam and start prying the front and back covers apart, except I couldn't hold the seam open with the screwdriver and insert the tool at the same time; a third hand would have been helpful here. After much digging and scraping, I finally wedged the plastic thingy (its sharp edge now pretty well wrecked) inside and began pulling the covers apart; you're supposed to, again, "gently" work the tool all the way around your iPod and neatly snap off the back cover, but eventually I lost patience and resorted to brute force. Not exactly elegant, but no apparent damage done.

Next, you remove the thin, flat battery, which takes up almost the entire back side of the iPod. The battery is attached to the player with a thick adhesive pad, and pulling the battery free almost took the innards of my iPod with it. Oops. That done, I unplugged the old battery, pressed the replacement against the adhesive pad (it was still sticky), plugged it in, tucked the tiny battery wire in a space behind the iPod's logic board, and snapped the metal cover back on. Three hours of charging later, my old iPod was ready to rock again.

So yes, the kit worked as advertised, and its $30 list price is significantly cheaper than the $60 Apple charges for replacing out-of-warranty iPod batteries. But I'd seriously question the wisdom of prying open your iPod unless you know what you're doing—and if, indeed, you're made of stern DIY stuff, you might have something in your toolbox that will work just as well as the crude tools that ship with Blue Raven's kit.