I have a Samsung Note II. I realize that this is an outdated model, but it works great and does everything I need it to do. Unfortunately I had it out of the case and dropped it on concrete, cracking the glass screen in several places. The touch screen works perfectly so the only thing damaged is the cover glass.
I searched Amazon and purchased a new glass screen and it came with tools and instructions on how to do the replacement. I’m fairly good at these things, but still not sure if this is a good idea. Had anyone here repaired their smartphone’s glass and if so any tips or tricks you would recommend?
It can be done but it’s a gamble. You can spend $50 on tools and supplies and a lot of time watching YouTube videos and you’ll still probably either damage the digitizer or get bubbles in the glue or otherwise have a damaged phone. You can pay a shop to repair it, that should cost around $150. I broke the glass on my note 3 and find that an unlocked refurbished replacement was only $250 on Amazon and it looks brand new. (Unfortunately I wasted the time and effort and money trying to fix my old one before I realized that, so it ultimately cost $300 including the failed repair attempt.)
Im gonna give you my similar experience with a broken glass galaxy s3 mini. The glass is glued with a clear adhesive to the screen/digitizer, and is not meant to be replaced. You have 3 options as far as i understood(i am not a professional):
1)Remove the glass and place the new one, using double sided tape to hold it in place. This is the simplest but the results may not be very good.Dust can get in between the glass and the screen and the touch function may not work very well due to bad coupling between the glass and the digitizer.
2)Replace the glass, but use a liquid optically clear adhesive to glue it in place. This is a lot harder, but can give very good results. In my case the first try i used too much pressure on the srceen, and a lot of the glue sqeezed out and i ended up with a lot of bubbles near the edges.I tried again with a little more glue and less pressure, i got near perfect results. The glue also covered all the scratches i made to the screen while i was scraping off the cracked glass. However you mileage may vary and it is very easy to completely fuck it up.
3)Replace the entire glass/screen assembly. If i was doing it again this is the route i would probably choose. It generally is the easiest and most sure to work.It is also the way it was meant to be replaced, as an entire assembly.
I bought a Galaxy Note I from a friend who had it repaired by a skilled guy who worked out of his house at a low price. When I treated it in the same way as my friend and cracked the screen, she had lost the contact details for the repair guy and I was left with youtube videos.
I just decided to forego the screen and stylus in lieu of possibly messing it up worse.
The YouTube videos make it look a lot simpler than it is in many cases. In particular the above-mentioned issue of the layers being glued is a possibility. One that I tried had this problem and it wasn’t mentioned/shown on any videos of a very similar model.
To get all the LCD connectors and any “tape” holding them down on the backside is another extra layer of difficulty if you need to replace the whole component.
And that’s just getting the screen off.
Getting everything back together neatly is also a lot more difficult than shown in the videos.
One thing to try is get a really broken phone/tablet somewhere (maybe from a friend) and try taking the screen off of that.