[The Placid Casual]

2 weeks ago I upgraded from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS. I had the 3G for 12 months and never had a single issue with it, despite it falling off a moving car at 40mpg, and various other scrapes.

I decided that the 3G was too young to be put in a drawer, and my wife's nokia e7x was playing up, so she offered (!) to take it off my hands to save her buying a new one...

Well, 3 days later, shortly after waxing lyrical about the best mobile she had ever had, and how easy it was to use... you can guess... it fell from a bed side table onto a cup, and the screen shattered! :/

Obviously not covered under Applecare, I called Apple to get a price to fix it... €199 minimum! So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I am in France and looked on Amazon for a new screen and digitizer, but no joy. I looked up the private price to fix it - €69 minimum.

As some background, I used to work as a Mac technician and was a 'Mac Genius' for Apple for a long while... so when I saw the part on Amazon.com US for $20, I jumped at it.

The part arrived in France within about 10 days, and this afternoon I set about repairing it.

My thoughts;

Not an easy repair for the inexperienced, but if you have a little experience in IT hardware, very doable.

An hour or so later, and 30 mins of that with a hairdryer heating the insanely hard adhesive on the back of the screen to separate it (!), the iPhone is like new! Happy wife, happy me, and all for less than €30.

All in all, if you have an iPhone with a cracked screen, it is not the end of the world! These things are amazingly repairable it seems!

If any of you want info on specifics of the change, just PM me.

TPC.

[Rumor]

Not an easy repair for the inexperienced, but if you have a little experience in IT hardware, very doable.

Not true. My S/O did so by herself and has very little IT experience, mostly it is running apps for school. I didn't guide her, but there was a good set of directions on youtube. However, one of the tools was a guitar pick or something equally cheesy.

Anyhow, it isn't hard to replace.

[The Placid Casual]

I agree to an extent, but I never underestimate the trouble people with no affinity or ability with repairing electronic devices can get into.

Your S/O by means of the fact that they had the confidence to attempt the fix, adapted tools for the job etc, obviously had a level of skill and good instructions. In this instance it is not hard.

However if you asked some people, with shall we say little or no electronic experience to take off a screen with a suction cup, undo very small OO screens, slide a very delicate LCD out of position, use a heat gun to separate adhesive from delicate sensors, electronic components, replace sharp broken glass, then manipulate very small connectors back into place etc, I am not sure that all would be successful. Hence the many scare stories in the comments of the YouTube videos out there ('OMG I broke my LCD when I took the screen out', 'I can't get connector 3 back in to the socket', 'I cracked X/Y/Z').

I would not say that it is a very easy repair. It is on a different level to say swapping a hard drive. When you look at the videos, it is a not a simple 'slot in the new component' repair.