Have you ever heard my rant about how phones are the new computers? No? Well if you ever have five hours to spare, you should ask me about it, I assume it's fascinating. This strongly held belief is one of the main driving forces behind my desire to constantly upgrade my phones (the other main driving force is I'm a huge nerd). My most recent upgrade was to the T-Mobile HD2. The early reviews of the phone were that it was wonderful hardware, but windows mobile is still blowful. I had actually never had too many qualms with windows mobile, but I was never planning on running it anyway. It was a foregone conclusion that the wonderful people at xda-developers would hack it to run android and that seemed delightful to me.
If you're unfamiliar with the HD2, it is exactly the sprint EVO. If you're unfamiliar with the EVO, basically it's just a giant touch screen. By a wide margin the largest screen I've ever had on a phone and it made me seriously consider investing in an e-book reader after I read a couple novels on there with no issues. It was also a delight for watching movies. It inexplicably came packaged with transformers 1 and 2, which answered the question "could you pay me to see transformers 2?" I was awful bored working second shift. The biggest thing I used it for was a music player. For some reason prior phones I've had lacked a basic 3.5mm jack. I'd made do by keeping an ipod and phone with me at work, but that was terrible.
Let me paint you a picture: I'm at work one day. I had just gotten into with my boss. He's a pretty strong willed person which is all well and good, except that I'm incapable of backing down when I know I'm right. This has on occasion led to me putting some bass in my voice. The details of this aren't important, but suffice to say I was in a tizzy. I had recently changed what I was listening to on my phone and I put my phone in the breast pocket of my shirt instead of my pants pocket as I normally would. You see I was at the time wearing my lab coat and pocket access is at a premium, it seemed easier to just go with the shirt. I'm typically fairly conscious of my electronics spatial position, having in the past suffered some tragedies. This time however I leaned over, not realizing that my shirt in fact did a terrible job of holding the phone in place, it fell out and I swore very loudly.
The crack is quite a bit worse than it looks there. It was actually still perfectly functional, so long as you weren't concerned with the possibility of getting a piece of glass lodged in your finger. Tragically, I WAS concerned about getting a piece of glass lodged in my finger. Luckily I had a plan.
The first phone I ever got was a Motorola A630. It sucked, though at the time seemed sweet. When I bought it I signed up for insurance because that seemed like a sweet deal. I'm a bit of a klutz sometimes and the prospect of dropping even more money on a new phone was depressing. I didn't read the paperwork very well which later lead to two realizations.
1. It wasn't as though they would just send me a phone free of charge, there was a deductible on it, in this case $125. That was alright though. I mean $125 was still far less than I would spend on a new phone.
2. Apparently if you break a lot of phones they'll drop your ass without telling you. You might say, "Mike, don't you read your phone bill? Didn't you notice that the insurance fee stopped showing up?" No, no I don't read my phone bill. I can't remember what the exact number was, but I think it was after three breaks (maybe within a certain amount of time, these happened pretty close together).
After fighting with city hall to no avail I went into making it work mode. How hard could the screen be to fix on my T-Mobile Dash (I had at some point upgraded my phone, but didn't change any service, so the insurance rolled over [anyone remember the Dash? No? Well fuck you, it was sweet])? Well given that a new screen was only about $30 I was willing to find out.
Turns out it was pretty easy. The Dash was beautifully designed, I suspect I could swap a screen out on that phone in less than two minutes. After that I never even tried to sign up for insurance, I just held the unwavering belief that I could fix any problem that might arise. That has always held true with any phone I've had since, up till now.
The HD2 is an amazing piece of hardware. Tragically, as these things become more advanced, they become increasingly difficult to take apart. I have a system when disassembling a vacuum at work. I start by removing every single screw I can find. Then I beat it. I used half of that process here. Thing is, there are only four visible screws on the back of the phone. Being, as I was, unwilling to beat the phone, I turned to my old friend the internet. Apparently the official HTC assembly/disassembly videos got leaked, viewable here, pretty interesting if you can get past the narration. The problem with this was it contained a ton of superfluous information. The video explained in no uncertain terms how to take the phone apart to it's very base components. I didn't want to go that far if I didn't have to, the fewer things you take apart the fewer chances you have to put it back together wrong. After a couple of viewings I managed to figure out the bare minimum of what I had to do.
For reference, there's the phone with the cover off. The video showed me that I just wanted to remove the circuit board on the bottom (the copper covered one). It was held in place by three screws, but there were numerous cables coming off. Again, I didn't want to disconnect anything I didn't have to, so here's what I figured to be the bare minimum.
The obvious ones were these two. I have no idea what they do.
Having uploaded that, I see that the circle I drew is hard to see, unfortunately I don't feel like fixing it. This was an important one to come off. It was a flat cable that snuck up through that hole that, it was one of the cables really holding the board in place. Working with this type of cable is a dream as those connectors are basically just clamps so I know damn well if the cable is in place or not.
The last that had to be removed was the flat cable you can sort of see pictured there. There was one more cable that held the circuit board to the rest of the phone, but it didn't need to come off, with all the ones that I had removed, I could just flip the board out of the way. That exposed this beaut.
That was the only connector holding the screen in place. Well that and the glue, have I mentioned the glue yet? Actually let me go back in the story a bit here.
The way the touch screen on the HD2 works is you have your basic run of the mill lcd screen (I don't think it's actually an lcd, but damned if I'm gonna look it up) and then attached to the top of it is a digitizer. The digitizer senses the tiny electrical connections that you finger makes when it comes in contact with it and translates that to movement on the screen. The important thing to understand here is that there are two separate aspects of the screen and in this instance when I say the screen was broken, what I mean is the digitizer was broken.
The last thing keeping me from removing the digitizer was the glue around the edges. Luckily I'm like a godamn surgeon with an x-acto knife. With that off it was just a simple matter of putting the new one on, couple drops of superglue around the edges, connectors back in place and seal that shit up. Boot up and
It didn't fucking work.
GOD. DAMNIT.
I'm not very good at describing aspects of myself, but here I might say that I have a high mechanical aptitude. What I'm saying with that here is that haven taken something apart once, I can do the second time in my sleep. My hope was that there was just some loose wire somewhere, as any problem would represent a serious difficulty to fix. Luckily it was just the digitizer connector that had somehow gotten pulled out. Fix that, make damn sure it was in place, seal that shit up. Boot up and
Quick aside here. The only time there isn't music playing in my apartment is when I'm asleep or watching TV. At all other times there's something going. When I'm working on a project the volume goes up.
Quick aside here. When I'm listening to music, if it's a song I like and I know the lyrics (so, pretty much any song I like) I will sing along without even thinking about it. If I get excited for whatever reason I tend to get really into the "performance."
During this fix I had been listening to K'naans exceptional album Troubadour. At the time the phone booted up Fires in Freetown was on and you better believe I was belting, loud as I could
SHE PULLED OUT HER MATCH AND SHE BURNED DOWN MY HOME.
I suspect my neighbor hates me. Turns out it worked. Here's a stupid set shot, since I assume that's the only reason people read this blog
Fact: I gesture while on the phone, often emphatically (well, when the situation demands it). I blame the speech team.
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