When this happens, it is usually waived to make the repair because by now we already know that sending it to assistance means being without the phone for at least a month and that, if the warranty does not cover the incidental damage, the price of repairs could be very salty.
Although most mobile phones have not been designed to be fixed, with the right tools and detailed guidance it is still possible to solve many problems economically .
Clearly opening a smartphone like the iPhone or the Samsung will almost certainly invalidate the warranty and probably also the possible extended warranty. Repairing a smartphone is not an easy task , but those who have good manual skills with screwdrivers and electronic components should have no difficulty performing these operations to fix them from home.
Repair tools and kits
Whatever phone you are trying to disassemble, you need some tools to keep on hand:
A screwdriver kit, especially the small ones. Screwdrivers for special screws like those of the iPhone we can find them in convenient kits, like the one available here -> Mini Screwdrivers, Precision Screwdriver Set Kit Screwdrivers 25
Plastic tools to pull up the broken screen, via a snap or suction mechanism. These kits can also be purchased online, like the one available here -> LCD opening pliers, LCD screen opening pliers (€ 12).
The spare part to be replaced (for example the screen or the internal battery); spare parts can usually be found on Amazon, on Ebay or even in small shops that sell used phones.
How to find the guide to repair the phone
Due to the great variety of models, it will be essential to find a specific guide to repair our specific smartphone model; thankfully, there are plenty of do-it-yourself repair sites on the Internet. In addition to the video guides to look for on Youtube, the main site to look at, the absolute protagonist of this article is iFixit , the best resource on the Internet where you can find step-by-step instructions to disassemble and repair the most popular smartphones .
The site is in English but since each guide contains very clear photos and images, it becomes easy to consult even if you do not know the language.
In particular we have guides to repair the following modern smartphones:
Each model of smartphone and mobile phone is also given a reparability score (from 0 to 10), which indicates the ease of opening it and changing a piece inside it.
You can also see the ranking of repairability of smartphones to find out that the easiest smartphone to repair is the Google Pixel 3a XL (at least among the latest smartphones), while all the modern Samsung we saw in the previous list are quite difficult to repair. (grade 3).
Types of repair
Not all hardware damage to a phone can be repaired; the most common are listed below.
Screen
The broken screen, a classic damage, fortunately often repairable.
Adjusting a cracked or broken screen can be quite simple and inexpensive depending on how the smartphone is built.
The replacement cost goes up a lot if there is only one screen on the touchscreen smartphone and there is no protective glass over the digitized one.
In cases where the display is not fused to the glass, you can replace this broken glass without difficulty, otherwise you will also need to intervene on the cable connecting the screen to the motherboard and things get complicated.
Also from iFixit we can get the guides to repair the screen for all the smartphones included in the previous list, in particular on the latest generation iPhones ( iPhone XS Max , iPhone XS , iPhone Xr and iPhone X ).
Upper speaker and sensors
Among the components that we can replace we also find the upper speaker and sensors, which can easily be damaged after a fall. Once the device is open replace the upper speaker and the sensors is relatively simple, since it is usually a single piece connected with a plug directly to the logic board.
Battery
One of the components that is often replaced is certainly the battery, which can lose much of its capacity once the two years of use have passed. Although all modern smartphones have an internal battery, it is connected to the logic board via connectors and can be easily replaced by switching on the internal components.
We will rarely have damage to the rear or front camera; but if it stops working, the flash does not work or we see lines or cracks appear, the replacement is quite simple, particularly on the iPhone
