A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about how fixing your own cell phone is harder than you think. As the story below will illustrate, it turns out that that’s true even for some “professional” repair shops. This is the story of a man, his Motorola Droid 2 Global, a Toledo, OH cell phone repair shop, and how we, Jet City Device Repair, came to the rescue.
Disastrous Repair
It all started when a very nice gentleman named Gregg, who lives in Toledo, dropped his Droid 2 Global and took it to a local repair shop. They assured him they could fix it. They lied. They had his phone for over a month, he shelled out $60 for parts, and they almost destroyed the phone. When he received the phone back – a month later – its brand new touchscreen didn’t work at all. A touchscreen phone without a working touchscreen isn’t much good.
That was when Gregg found our website and gave us a call. I told him we didn’t know if we could fix it or not at this point, but that we’d take a look and see what we could do. He mailed us out the phone and we received it a couple of days later. As the pictures in this post show, it was a disaster. You can see from one picture that the ribbon cable that connects the two halves of the phone was all torn up and patched over with electrical tape. The second picture shows the connector for the touchscreen. You will notice that the small ribbon cable plugged into the connector is way too small. That’s because it’s the wrong part! The screen the company used was meant for a Droid 2 and not the Droid 2 Global – they are different parts.
What you can’t see from those two pictures are the 6 missing screws, the missing rubber grommet that allows the proximity sensor to work was missing (the proximity sensor turns the phone’s screen off when you hold it up to your ear), and the fingerprints and dust all over the LCD (the LCD is what displays the phones picture).
I personally handled this phone and it took me about 90 minutes to get everything squared away and working again (a normal cracked Droid screen repair takes us about 30 minutes to fix – far less than a month). I started with completely replacing the ribbon cable that connects the two halves of the phone. Then I replaced the touchscreen with an actual Droid 2 Global screen and cleaned off the LCD. Lastly, I used some specially cut neoprene padding to replace the missing rubber grommet on the proximity sensor. Once everything was put back together, the phone fired up and worked like new again!
So the moral of the story is to be careful and diligent about choosing who you let fix your cell phone. Here are a few quick tips about that:
- Make sure you’re dealing with a reputable company. Do they have a website? Do they have an actual office space (versus a guy working in his basement)? Do they have a business license? How long have they been in business?
- Give them a call and talk with them. This isn’t fool proof but it can give you some reassurance about the people that will be pulling your $400+ phone apart.
- What kind of guarantees do they offer? Do they warranty their work? Do they promise that if they can’t fix it they’ll refund you your money? If they actually wreck your phone, do they promise to buy a new one?
- Check out their references. Hopefully they will have a Yelp or Facebook page and there will be some reviews and comments about their service. Do a little Google search on their business and see what you can find out.
- Make sure they’ve actually fixed your type of phone before. If so, it should be posted on their website, they should be able to talk intelligently about the repair, and you should be able to find someone online that mentions them doing the repair.
If you do about 15 minutes worth of due diligence, you should be able to get a pretty good feel for whether or not someone is a legitimate and honest cell phone repair company. There are some very good cell phone repair companies out there. Unfortunately, there are a lot more bad ones. So be careful and choose wisely.