Part 2: The Removal

FRONT GLASS PANEL ARRIVES
Phew, glad I am still alive to give you a feedback on my phone – 8 days after ordering the OEM front glass panel from ebay not only did it reach home (sri lanka – remember?) I also received a free pry tool from the merchant – what a nice chap!
Although the prytool seemed a useful tool it did not serve my purpose, I was not planning to open up the phone casing, remove wires and screws etc. if I had purchased the digitizer (which equals to the new 3G) then it would have made sense.

SEPERATION
Now to remove the cracked glass panel I had no decent tool. So just went to the local pharmacy close by and bought myself a surgical blade Rs. 20 (USD $ 0.20). Started off carefully removing pieces from the initial crack (when I dropped the phone) although the pieces were small they were strongly glued to the lcd panel, as I reached the bigger pieces it was tough – when attempting to remove the bigger piece they shatter to small pieces and if your not careful small sugar sized shards hit your face / eyes. (be very careful – if you can wear goggles), it adhesive used is on the front glass was very strong, at that moment I did not have any solvents to ease the grip of the adhesive. So giving a rest to my hands was thinking what was the best solvent to loosen the adhesive, then with a slight doubt went to the cosmetic store in front of me and got my self a nail polish remover Rs. 65 (USD $ 0.65) along with a pack of Q-tips Rs 15 (USD $ 0.15) tried dipping the q-tip into the solvent (nail polish remover) and applying it to the cracked areas then attempted to remove the cracked pieces amazingly the cracks start coming up… yay! At some places it was hard to lift the cracked pieces, what I did was I pointed the blade between the crack and started prying slowly – that worked!

Finally I managed to remove the entire broken glass from the iphone, I applied more of the solvent using the q-tip to remove the remaining adhesive that was on the solvent (see image below) – during this process I figured that if I had removed the casing and then the front glass panel , it would have made things messy so if you are planning to remove the glass I insist you to NOT remove the casing unless you are trying to replace the digitizer.














So far it has been a smooth ride, now the next step is to paste the OEM front glass panel - more updates coming soon so Stay tuned

Part 1: The Story

After an year of drooling on an iPhone, my wonderful wife gets me one as a birthday gift - living in Sri Lanka (which is an unnoticed island and most of the time mistaken as india *i know*) iphone did not get launched (or will it ever) so this was a jail broken one.. running the 1.1.4 firmware. oh wasn`t i drooling over it for days and days, i hardly had the time to concentrate on other things since i was way too busy with my phone fiddling...

Day 3: I dropped the phone made a small dent and some scratch on the back case - dunno about the phone but it was very painful for me to drop with my clumsy hands right on the 3rd day... arghhhhh! I somehow managed to clean the scratches away but the dent on the top was still slightly visible... I figured I should get a case for the thing before it could get any worse...

Day 10: I drop my phone again, this time i tried all my best to catch it... I failed.... and the price of that is... a BROKEN SCREEN. it was painful again...

unlike the US or the Europeans we do not have any apple store here that will repair the phone for us, even if they do, I might as well buy two more iphones for the price they ask to repair... what options am i left with? buy the OEM Front Panel from some place that sells and ships to Sri Lanka and get myself geared to fix my phone... not going to be easy but this blog is dedicated to all of those who had gone through what i have and need some guts to fix the damn screen. wish me luck.