Education Fixing a phone digitizer

So the digitizer on my Lumia 520 cracked. I was going to bin it but I thought I'd try and learn something new by fixing it and chucking it on ebay.

I'm a bit confused about one thing though, on the lumia the digitizer appears to be held in place by the casing its self but I keep reading about adhesive (1mm double sided tape) used to hold it in place. Is that something that's required on all digitizers or if the casing holds it in place will it be ok?

 

The adhesive is there to double up what's holding the digitizer in place and to prevent dust and moisture ingress. Also, the phone was designed with a 1mm tolerance behind the glass to allow for the adhesive, so if you leave it out it's likely to break easily in the future because the top, bottom and sides of the digitizer are not correctly supported.

 

Lovely, thanks!

Is it just a strip across the top, bottom and sides?

 

Yes, two thick strips across the top and bottom, two thin ones down the sides. Very simple, although still not as straightforward as pre cut iDevice adhesives.

You just have to make sure there are no gaps between the strips of adhesive at the corners where they meet, otherwise the phone will fill up with pocket lint in no time.

 

While we're here, uni, do you know anything about fixing cracks in screens of the Galaxy Note line?

 

Sorry EC, I haven't had a Note apart for anything yet. By fixing a crack do you mean replacing the digitiser?

 

Essentially, although I was hoping to be able to just replace the glass. Aparently with the Notes and S*'s that isn't really possible though.

Don't worry too much about it, I'll probably just have to bite the bullet and get a whole new screen assembly, but I thinought it might be worth checking to see if you had encountered the same thing before.

I presume replacing the screen assembly is fairly straightforwards?

 

I saw a vid on YouTube demonstrating how to replace the glass on an S4. Can only presume the Note is the same, was quite easy actually although required the use of a heat gun.

Replacing the screen assembly involves opening the phone up and disconnecting a bunch of connections and removing the PCB and other parts blah blah blah but also looks doable. I think you need to use heat to remove something with that too though.

 

Looked into replacing the casing on my partners S3, I believe the note is put together in a similar way. Getting either casing or glass etc is quite cheap, but you have to de-laminate the screen after tearing the phone apart using a heatgun.

It also looks like you can just heatgun it and tear the screen off:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtiyU-RQUU0

 

With a heat gun be careful because you can kill the screen.

 

You definite?

 

Enough heat will in fact tint the pixels. Careful application is fine, but just make sure you don't accidentally burn the LCD/AMOLED.

 

I don't know about the Note, but I know that with the S3 you have to either buy a full assembly or live with a phone that's not put together as well as it was to begin with. I had serious trouble with the only S3 that I tried replacing the glass only on, and ended up just buying a full LCD and digitizer assembly for it. Unless the LCD sits in a frame on the back of the glass a la iPhone 3, you're going to need to replace the whole assembly. I'm not sure if it's cheaper for manufacturers to build phone screens and digitizers as one laminated unit now or if they only do it because they can make it thinner that way, but I'm not sure there is a new smartphone on the market that has the LCD in a frame instead of laminated to the glass. Apparently there are people who can replace just the glass and digitizer on an iP5, but it's the same situation as with the S3, unless you have a tonne of time and probably a finely controlled IR workstation, it's never going to work properly.

iPads don't have this though, and they're pretty thin... I had serious trouble explaining to a customer a few days ago that he was wrong to tear the fixafone tech to pieces when quoted £100 for an iPad Mini digitizer replacement when "it only needed the front glass replaced"

Yes this is true because I've done more iPhone 3 screens than I care to remember, and on a few occasions I tinted one corner of the old broken LCD when separating it from the metal backplate.

 

Well, the difference is ~£50 for new glass + paying someone to do the replacement versus £160 for the whole LCD unit.

£160 is a lot, but I guess it's a worthy investment for a £500 phone.

 

Yeah, £160 on a £500 phone is well within economic repair

 

Do you know a good place to buy parts?

EDIT: I'd also quite like to get a new bezel as I've managed to make some nasty dents in mine recently, surprisingly the cracked screen isn't due to dropping though. Need to invest in a nice case methinks.