iPhone 4 Screen Teardown

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle!

In an effort to get fit, I'd been going for long walks.  Anyway, I enjoy listening to podcasts while doing so, and I did this on my trusty iPhone 4.

Or should I say 'rusty'  The sweat in my pocket payed havoc with the end connector and when some obvious (non-photographed) corrosion set in I couldn't charge my phone.  Eeep.

So out with the contact cleaner and toothbrush and I could soon charge my phone again, but the contact cleaner seeped up into the phone and left cloudy dark spots on my screen, just like this. Again I'd taken no photos of my own at this stage.

But at the end I got some sweet LEDs to play with!

Love eBay

So I picked up a replacement screen assembly off of eBay and swapped it out.  Plently of examples on how to do this are out there but I followed iFixit's guide.

The Damage

So out of curiosity, I pulled the broken screen apart at the following pics are the shots I took.  Not too much to talk about that, so on with the money shots!

Try as I my, I could not get the backing mylar to photograph as silver.  Yes, that black slab in teh back is actually pretty reflective silver.

The diffuser should be clear - not frosted as shown above.  It actually took me  a few months to getting around to replacing the screen and I was surprised to find that the diffuser was still wet from the contact cleaner.

Mylar Off.

Peeling Back the Layers

Frosty = Bad

Also Quite Brittle

Pulling the LCD Off.  Never buy just the replacement digitiser.  No way you can separate that from the LCD.

Polarisers.

LCD, Mangled.

The Gorilla Glass is impressive stuff.  This is as far as I was game to bend it.

The backlight LEDs were *tiny*

But Bright!

Pushing 30V, 20mA

Told you they are bright!

The backlight LEDs are very impressive.  Less than 1mm thick, 60mW of light and I coudl work all night on my bench.  The photo gives the impression that my workbench is lit up more than what my eyes see, but these LEDs will end up doing permanent duty as additional work lights, once I work out a robust way to mount them!