You love your iPhone. It’s packed with great, easy-to-use features and looks great. Then one day, it slips out of your hand, hits the sidewalk, and your once-beautiful iPhone has unsightly cracks in the glass surface. What are you doing now?
You couldn’t do anything. In most cases the LCD (the image) under the glass is fine and the touchscreen functionality still works, so you might as well use it that way until the next version of the iPhone comes out and you feel the need to to update.
If you’re like most iPhone owners, this “do nothing” approach isn’t a great option. You have an iPhone because you have style and it doesn’t look fancy anymore. So how do you fix it? There are many options.
First, you could buy a new iPhone. Just walk into an AT&T or Apple store and walk out with a new iPhone. This is definitely the simplest and fastest option. It is also the most expensive. You may have bought your iPhone for as little as $99, but had to sign a 2-year contract to get that price. Now that you have a contract, they will charge you around $500 for a replacement phone.
Another option is to have Apple repair it for you. This option is less expensive than buying a new phone, but it is still one of the most expensive ways to get your phone repaired. It also requires you to be near an Apple Store. The cost of choosing this option for your cracked screen is $199 plus sales tax.
By far the least expensive option is to go to eBay and buy a replacement glass screen for around $20-$30 and install it on your phone yourself. A simple eBay search for the terms “iPhone touch screen” will reveal a number of different companies selling touch screen glass (3G and 3GS glass are different so make sure you get the right one for your version of iPhone) . Then a quick trip to YouTube and a search for “how to fix an iPhone screen” will produce a video that shows you how to do the repair.
Be careful: This repair is not trivial. A heat gun is required to remove current broken glass from your phone and if you are not careful you may destroy your phone completely. If you choose this option, make sure you are comfortable with repairing small electronic components and exercise extreme caution.
A much simpler and safer option for the do-it-yourselfer is to purchase a complete display assembly, not just the touch screen glass. There are two options with this route: get the assembly with the LCD (around $100) or without the LCD (around $60). Using either of these options means you don’t need to use a heat gun to replace your glass and you should be able to do the repair yourself in about 10-15 minutes. A video is worth 10,000 words, so again, head over to YouTube and search for “iPhone display assembly repair” and you’ll find several videos using this method.
The final option is one of the safest and still very profitable: have a third party repair the iPhone for you. If you live in a decent-sized city, do a search on Craigslist and you’ll find someone within walking distance who will do it for under $100. They should be able to do it for you in about 15 minutes while you wait.
If you don’t live in a big city, there are some companies that offer repairs by mail. Again, this will usually set you back less than $100, but you’ll have to be without your phone for about a week (a couple of days each way for shipping and another day for repair). A simple Google search for “iPhone Repair Mail” will reveal a plethora of companies offering the repair.
So don’t throw away your iPhone just because you dropped it and broke the screen. Save yourself several hundred dollars and get it fixed. If you’re the hands-on electronics type, DIY options are your best route. Not as efficient with a screwdriver and small flat cables? Then find a local store to help or mail it in for repair.