A few weeks ago I managed to drop my iPhone onto a concrete sidewalk. Unfortunately, it didn't survive the fall very well and the front digitizer panel (the one you touch) shattered into a million pieces. I was faced with three options; pay Apple a ridiculous amount of money to fix my phone, wait to buy the iPhone 4, or try to perform the repair myself.
It turned out that a replacement digitizer panel kit can be had for as little as $20! Armed with the replacement kit, a how-to video on YouTube (thanks Herbet!), and a couple of hours, I embarked on carrying out the repair. All in all, the repair was fairly simple and my phone is like new! A few pictures I took during the repair follow.
iPhone 3GS Digitizer Replacement Kit:
My busted iPhone before the surgery:
After the first stage of dissassembly, the digitizer assembly has been freed from the body of the iPhone. There are three small connectors that connect the assembly to the body:
Next up, was separating the perfectly functioning LCD from the digitizer. Had to be careful to not get any fingerprints on the LCD!:
The most painstaking portion of the repair was removing the broken pieces of the digitizer from the frame that it is mounted on. This process is quite slow and tedious as you've got to be careful to not damage any of the underlying sensors that are also mounted on the digitizer frame:
After cleaning up the digitizer frame from any excess glue and glass shards, the frame is ready for a new set of double sided stickers which will ultimately hold the new digitizer in place:
The assembly process was basically the disassembly in reverse. As you can see from this photo, the surgery was a resounding success:
Resources used during the repair:
- How-to video from YouTube
- Amazon.ca for the replacement digitizer kit