Ok so I have just been a massive nob! I placed my iPhone into a slightly wonky and apparently very slippy wooden cafe table, it promptly slid off the table landing face first onto the concrete pavement. The front Screen is completely smashed, cracks all over the screen. My question is what should I do next? Talk to apple to repair the phone? Buy one of these replacement screen kits? I want it to look as good a new before it took a suicide jump off the table!
Go into a phone repair shop. They should do it for about 60 quid. If you are experienced in taking small devices like this apart then do it yourself but you have to completely disassemble the phone since everything is built from the screen up. It won't even work out that much cheaper.
Is it under warranty or insured? If not the screen kits are on eBay/Amazon for about £40 £25 as above ^^. Put one on my Dad's iPhone when he broke it, initially being very sceptical, but couldn't see any difference before/after, even with a cheap screen! Rather tricky replacing it though, make sure you have a good set of precision screwdrivers and some patience!
Once it arrives, consult ifixit's step by step guide and you'll be back up and running in no time If I can do this with my retarded sausage fingers, anyone can. Just be careful you don't drop/lose any of the tiny screws, and keep them in some sort of order as you disassemble. Makes putting it back together again a doddle!
With the kits off eBay you normally get the screw drivers and tools. Daunting at first but it takes about 5 mins now. Seem to do all my friends and familys
The problem is it has about 4 months warranty remaining, I wanted to eBay it in a week or so to upgrade to the iPhone 5. Will voiding the warranty and stating it has a replaced screen affect the value by a lot? If I didnt plan on selling it and I could find a guaranteed good quality replacement I would defiantly do it myself.
All i would say - is make a note of where all the screws go, like a really good list, as this is the hardest bit, putting all the screws back where you found them!
Having just completely disassemble and reassembled an old netbook to reapply TIM, I found the best way to remember where screws go is to take pictures and to place screws in the same layout on you table. Also my first longer experience with plastic retention clips (eww!) managed to get it back together with only very minor scratches where the parts come together. Any way pics are very helpful.
Um guys, make sure to get the screen for the 4S, while similar on the outside I do believe that on the inside there are slight differences. Just to be safe. Also: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Installing-iPhone-4S-Display-Assembly/7277/1 A very handy resource, the Iphone 4S is a joy to take apart, just be very careful about the ribbon cables on re-installation lest you tear one of them apart. And if you still have warranty, take it into the shops! If not then replace it, chances are most people won't care although the value might decrease a bit. What I do know is that the screen replacements for the Iphones tend to have a warmer color temperature. Outside of that it's almost indistinguishable.
The wife dropped her iPhone 4 and cracked the screen. Took it into the Apple Store told them what happened and they replaced it on the spot as she still had 3 days warranty left. I was extremely surprised they changed it so it's worth a shot.
Thanks for all the help, been looking on a few forums and by the looks of things unless you catch an Apple employee on a super good day and give him a sneaky reach around behind the genius bar, its gonna cost me £149 to replace the phone. Just ordered this off amazon and hopefully it should be here before the end of the week.
That sounds slightly more promising, from talking to a few friends and trawling through the net it seems really hard to get a free replacement out of them.
Well when it was out of warranty the power button on the top got really stiff. They wanted £150 to fix that!
True, but I prefer my own, nice ones for this kind of job - nothing as annoying as rounding off a screw because of a cheap eBay screwdriver having the wrong tip profile or something. I always lay the screws out on my desk in a logical order, usually trying to make the shape of the device (i.e. lots of tiny rectangles for an iPhone) and putting them back into the casing wherever possible.
Screens are never under warranty. Send it to Apple then at last you will get the warranty from them. Or use your home insurance if you have one.