Ever wanted to fix your broken smartphone yourself instead of spending hundreds of pounds taking it back to a store ? If you answered yes to that question this post is for you, here you will see the whole process of a repair i carried out on a friends HTC Desire, here we go.
Above is the actual device i used for this article and as you can clearly see its smashed to bits, it was the victim of a fall from a great height onto concrete and although this kind of drop wont allways result in this sort of damage it is always the most likely result !!. A new digitizer for this sort of device is easy to find on Ebay, i have replaced 4 or 5 different ones over the past couple of years and a quick search always results in the correct part – just be careful to check the model number first !!
Off with the battery cover and off with the back chasis panel, its all held together with a mix of torx head and cross head screws, dont try doing the job if you dont already own the correct tools as these screws are tiny and any atempt to remove them with the wrong driver will strip the heads and you wont ever be able to get them out again. At this stage you need to remove the lower plastic rear panel, underneath is the vibrating device and it comes out as one part, a little careful teasing with a credit card does the job here.
And with the plastic bits removed you can see the internals of the HTC Desire, its basically a lower half board and a small upper half board connected by a wide flexible interconnection strip and a wire for the antenna connection, at this stage your looking at some very easily broken surface mount technology. The whole motherboard comes out as one unit but you need to be careful with the volume rocker as its attached on a fly out section and it can get stuck and need a little extra attention to remove so be as careful as you can when proceeding with this stage.
Above you can see there are 3 very small connectors that allow the screens LCD to work and the touch screen part ( digitizer ) to function too. The connectors are easily damaged and require ultimate concentration when removing from their recepticles, you should use a small plastic pry bar or guitar pick, a credit card may also be used to lift these plugs from their sockets, when you come to put these connectors back you will notice how difficult they are to align correctly and its at that stage you risk damaging them most, so take care ! You will also need to remove the white plastic tape visible in the image above, this requires special attention as there’s a another connector underneath the tape, and its only about 2mm across - you have been warned :) You will also find the copper tape used to fix the screen needs peeling back to be removed and this again is a quite trick process, no need for me to say i warned you is there ??
you notice i havent gone through the instruction by showing you where every single screw is located? thats because i feel that if you need to be shown that sort of detail you really shouldnt be doing this job, i would expect you to have some experience taking stuff to pieces before so you will be happy to just remove all the screws as you find them, its your phone and your risk to take after all so if your not happy then dont continue!! OH well too late!! as you can see the Desire has been reduced to all its component parts now and on the far left you can see a brand new screen ( digitizer ) ready to go in. At this stage your totally screwed if you don’t think you can put it all back together, if your feeling like you should have taken it to the repair shop i do feel for you but its your mess to fix so get on with it 
The LCD panel above is kept out of harms way and in a dust free place and now its time to turn our attention to fitting the new digitizer or touch screen, i wont go on about how to remove the old broken glass as its common sense and you should end up with the Desire bezel nice and clean ready to apply the new glass frontage. The process of cleaning the parts before they go back together is worth spending ages on, use a microfibre cloth to remove every trace of dust and use a magnifier to check your work. On to sticking the new screen down i used a very sticky double sided tape available from model shops, its thicker than most plastic double sided tapes but much thinner than the foam based ones you sometimes buy at auto stores and motor factor…, see below .
Once you have stuck the tape to the bezel its just a case of placing the new glass screen back into the bezel, get it right first time because the tape is so sticky its not likely you will get it back out to try a second time, one thing you need to pay attention to here is the contact and connector strip on the new digitizer screen, it needs to be fed through the slot apperature at the bottom of the bezel first . Then you can basically read all this backwards because its time to put it all back together again, a few moments of caution at every stage of re assembly will save time in the long run.
One extra point i should raise here is that the replacement digitizers are sometimes sold by shops that deal in HTC ‘seconds’ that is to say second rate parts that didnt pass quality control at HTC, some faults are visible some are not, there will always be a very small chance that your fitting a broken screen back into the phone your fixing – imagine that when you come to power it up for the first time after the fix !
Anyway back to the repair job and things are looking good as we progress to the re-assembly phase of our HTC desire digitizer replacement .
Almost done and above you can see the phone back looking like a phone, its quite easy to put back together so just take some time and do it slowly, the volume rocker and power button need checking to make sure they went back in properly as does the keypad frontage, you need to make sure nothing needs to be forced into place, if it feels too tight then something is wrong, only small amounts of force are needed to click each part back into place.
And there we have it – the end result is a slightly second hand looking but fully functional HTC Desire. How do you like the white towel background i used to further exaggerate the nice appealing looks of the phone ? LOL :) You have just saved about £195 by opting to do the job yourself and if its a friends phone you can save them some cash and earn yourself a few ponds or bucks in the process, everyone wins and everyone is happy, you may also have learned something too – have fun :)
