Ouch: Broken crystal to iphone 3g

A few days ago I woke up to a broken iphone screen on my 3g.  I’m not sure how it happened but it was a spidering crack from the top left right.  After staring at it dumbly trying to figure out how I ended up with a cracked iphone screen while soundly sleeping — a couple of things occured to me.

1. I was going to have to fix it because of the touchscreen nature of an iPhone.  No clear tape like my old Motorola Razor.
2. It wasn’t going to be cheap to fix.

So I fired up google and started searching.  Turns out that I had a number of options:

1. Take it to my local Apple Store.
2. Fix it myself.
3. Swap the iphone sim card with a iphone that I didn’t break the crystal on.

Take it to my local Apple Store was the first option I found.  For me this is no problem.  There is a iPhone store at the local mall and I’ve always had good luck there.  However, unless I found a genious willing to swap the screen for some crazy reason — it would cost me $199 (let’s just round that too an even $200).   That’s alot of money, but the warranty would be maintained and since I’ve had one iPhone flake out on me, I’m not going to willy-nilly toss the warranty to the curb.  Still, money is really tight for me right now — so on to option #2.

Option #2 was to replace it myself.  There are a number of services available to do so, and you can buy the glass, the glass with the digitizer, or mail it in for a fix.  Things get a bit more confusing at this point as the different tutorials start to send you in one way or another.  However, you will need to acquire or make some special tools to complete the process yourself.

Purchasing the glass + digitizer are for sale online in a wide range or prices.  Figure between $50 – $100 dollars + shipping.  I’ll add some video links to the process here shortly.  Problem is that this will void your warranty, and for the price, you might as well save a few dollars more and take it to the apple store.

You can send it in to different services as well, but you have shipping costs again, you are still voiding your warranty, and its tough to tell how reputable these places are.  Still — if I was to done of these, I would do this for sure.

Option 3:  Find another iPhone and swap sim card.  Now, for most people this really doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Most people I am assuming don’t have a spare, unused, iphone with with an activated iphone sim card.

I actually did because I had a development phone for programming.  The exact same phone (16gig iPhone 3g) sitting there completely unused 95% of the time.   Since this phone is unused I don’t care about the screen being broken (though I will fix it) so I figured I would just swap one iphone sim card for another iphone sim card. I figured this would be cake — but then I started wondering if there was some additional issue with it. I know for example you can use an iphone sim card in a motorola razor, but you can’t use a razor sim card in an iphone.  You also can’t swap a iPhone 3g sim card with an iPhone Edge sim card.

Turns out there isn’t if they are both activated sim cards on 3g or 3GS:  what you do is back up both iPhones in iTunes (right mouse click, choose backup) and then straighten a paperclip out.  Push the paperclip into the little hole at the top of the iPhone and the SIM card will pop right out.  Do this with both units and swap the iphone sim card into the new phone.  Connect each phone to iTunes, re-activate if needed, and restore your back up to the correct phone.  Voila — complete.

Next Revision:  Links to different services, methods, and images to replace the broken iphone screen.