iphone’s second coming

A couple days ago my iPhone fell.  At first it seemed OK.  Then I tried switching apps by using the home button…

Nothing happened.  The only way to get back to the home screen was to reboot the damn thing.  After few reboots (which takes forever, by the way), I gave up and went on my way.  I was biking home that day (which is glorious), so I didn’t want to spend time troubleshooting my phone while standing in the hallway by my bike.

After getting home I looked into the issue online.  Apparently it’s a common problem.  And the fix?  No easy fix.  The culprit is likely a loose cable that’s behind the guts of the phone.  Nice.

I hesitated.  Taking the phone apart is no joke.  It requires blades, prying, care, and a hell of a lot of patience.  I wasn’t really looking to do something like that.  Maybe I could deal with rebooting the phone each time I wanted to do something different, I thought.

That’s when I realized that it wouldn’t charge anymore either.  The injury was deep, and the phone was basically paralyzed from the waist down.  Anything “down there” was all jacked up.  No home button, no syncing, no charging, and after a while the speakers starting making random noises.  Fun.  Intolerable.

Since the phone was worthless – can’t use it, can’t charge it, and can’t even save my data, I figure I might as well risk totally destroying the thing.  After all, I’ve been hating on the thing for the past half year for it’s absurdly unresponsive UI.

Step one:  Get the black piece off.  After using a sharp knife on the edges, I was able to get it off.

Step two:  Get the back panel off.  This took forever.  Some more blade and some screwdriver was able to get the job done.  If I spent a few more hours on it I probably could have gotten it off with less scratching, but I wasn’t going to sell the thing anyway, so whatever.  I’ll save myself the effort and use the screwdriver. (-:

Step whatever:  Figure out WTF is the problem.  The thing is tightly packed.  From reading online, I knew that the culprit cable was behind the battery, but after fiddling with it I got no results.  I kept at it though.  Eventually after working at it from multiple angles and reconnecting everything that disconnected itself, I got the thing working.

It’s amazing how easy things inside the phone get disconnected.  Simply gravity was enough to get the camera to fall off.  The same weak connector is also used to connect the side buttons and the screen.  What does this mean for you?  Don’t drop the thing, or it will die.

Drop it on it’s bottom, expect to get what I got.  No home, no sync, no charge.

Drop it on it’s face, and the screen is likely to get disconnected.  This one would also be a complete pain in the ass to fix.

Drop it on it’s back, and camera and/or side buttons are likely to go on you.

For best results, drop it on it’s head.