Ok, so I accidentally dropped my phone on a concrete walkway a couple of weeks ago and ended up with this:
I like to just go with an invisibleshield on my phone and no case. Unfortunately, it fell JUST on the right spot on the corner/side where the concrete hit the space where the invisibleshield wasn't - I'm not saying the invisibleshield would have prevented this, just that it definitely hit where it wasn't covering. Fortunately, having the shield on there was nice because I was still able to use the phone and none of the shards of glass dislodged, so that's nice.
So I was able to find a guy selling all the parts of essentially a brand new phone without the motherboard. I was trying to figure out why someone would end up with just the guts of a phone and really couldn't figure it out, but it was the right price and I ended up with a spare battery and a bunch of spare parts that may come in handy in the future (or not). I think one reason I could sort out in my head that someone would want to sell all the parts except the motherboard was if the phone had a bad ESN (i.e. possibly stolen). In which case, I feel really bad for anyone who might have had their phone stolen, but obviously, there's no way to verify this and the seller had a 100% approval on ebay, so hopefully that's not the case. FYI, they are now selling repair kits on ebay for roughly $150.
I didn't do any research and ended up purchasing just the glass in the few minutes of frantic rushing after I dropped my phone. Unfortunately, and this is important, our phone has the touch sensor layer, digitizer electronics, side bezel, and the glass FUSED together into one piece. This is done as far as I have read, to make the phone as thin as it is. This also means that you cannot just replace the glass. There's a repair video out there that shows just how difficult this is. Now that I have the glass coming though and a spare cracked screen that I won't need, I'm going to try to replace the glass and have a backup in case this happens again.
In any case, here's the new parts and the old next to each other (this is prior to me taking the cover over the motherboard off, the device on the right should look normal to you):
Here it is with the cover off, just several philips head screws which is VERY nice, thanks Samsung!
Here's the speaker portion popped off. It just comes right off with a little fanagling, no screws or anything which is nice. The bottom microphone piece comes out the same way.
Here's the motherboard pulled out, it's only held in with one screw on the bottom portion and that top speaker piece that popped out:
And here we are all put back together, just exactly the opposite of how you take it apart, the whole process was probably 30-45 minutes tops because I was very careful and taking pictures.
I like to just go with an invisibleshield on my phone and no case. Unfortunately, it fell JUST on the right spot on the corner/side where the concrete hit the space where the invisibleshield wasn't - I'm not saying the invisibleshield would have prevented this, just that it definitely hit where it wasn't covering. Fortunately, having the shield on there was nice because I was still able to use the phone and none of the shards of glass dislodged, so that's nice.
So I was able to find a guy selling all the parts of essentially a brand new phone without the motherboard. I was trying to figure out why someone would end up with just the guts of a phone and really couldn't figure it out, but it was the right price and I ended up with a spare battery and a bunch of spare parts that may come in handy in the future (or not). I think one reason I could sort out in my head that someone would want to sell all the parts except the motherboard was if the phone had a bad ESN (i.e. possibly stolen). In which case, I feel really bad for anyone who might have had their phone stolen, but obviously, there's no way to verify this and the seller had a 100% approval on ebay, so hopefully that's not the case. FYI, they are now selling repair kits on ebay for roughly $150.
I didn't do any research and ended up purchasing just the glass in the few minutes of frantic rushing after I dropped my phone. Unfortunately, and this is important, our phone has the touch sensor layer, digitizer electronics, side bezel, and the glass FUSED together into one piece. This is done as far as I have read, to make the phone as thin as it is. This also means that you cannot just replace the glass. There's a repair video out there that shows just how difficult this is. Now that I have the glass coming though and a spare cracked screen that I won't need, I'm going to try to replace the glass and have a backup in case this happens again.
In any case, here's the new parts and the old next to each other (this is prior to me taking the cover over the motherboard off, the device on the right should look normal to you):
Here it is with the cover off, just several philips head screws which is VERY nice, thanks Samsung!
Here's the speaker portion popped off. It just comes right off with a little fanagling, no screws or anything which is nice. The bottom microphone piece comes out the same way.
Here's the motherboard pulled out, it's only held in with one screw on the bottom portion and that top speaker piece that popped out:
And here we are all put back together, just exactly the opposite of how you take it apart, the whole process was probably 30-45 minutes tops because I was very careful and taking pictures.
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