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Repair your iPod & iPhone: A DIY option
Sep 1st
Damaging your iPod or iPhone can be an expensive accident. If you have insurance on your phone then by all means, you’re covered. If however, you are like most people out there and do not insure their phones, there are a few options you can take. You can send your device in to an iPhone repair shop or you can order the replacement parts in and perform a DIY install. For those opting the DIY route, I strongly suggest that you familiarise yourself with the procedure by searching on Youtube or google for disassembly instructions on your iPhone or iPod before proceeding. We also recommend that you take your time and do not rush the installation process. We have seen many times before when customers rush a repair job and come back with to us to get other replacement mobile phone parts they have broken during the process. The main aim here for doing a DIY install is to save money and if you’re breaking additional parts, you’re defeating the whole purpose in the first place.
Common repair jobs we see by far are broken touch screens/digitizers and broken LCD screens. The digitizer (or glass touch screen panel) is the glass part of the screen that detects inputs from your fingers and used for navigation purposes. The digitizer sits on top of your LCD screen. The LCD screen is the part that displays the images of your phone and has a backlight. A good way to determine what is broken is to look at your screen. Is the LCD bleeding or has large black blobs? If the answer is yes, then your LCD screen needs replacing. If it is working fine and is just the glass touch screen that is broken, then you will only need to replace the digitizer. On a side note, some devices such as the iPod Touch 4th generation and iPhone 4, both the LCD and digitizer are glued together by a strong adhesive and cannot be separated. This means you will need to replace both at the same time regardless of what is broken. Again, we encourage that you do some research (or contact us) to make sure you don’t get duped into purchasing useless parts as we have seen some unethical busienss practices going around.
For water damaged phones, we don’t recommend repairing these as the price will usually escalate to make it non feasible. We don’t recommend that you open up your phone and instead, we have heard that Apple replace water damaged phones for $250 (even if it is not functioning) so that would be a better option for you.
When you’re going ahead with the DIY install, ensure you are working in a clean, dust free environment. The last thing you want is annoying white specks of dust underneath your digitizer glass touch screen after reinstalling the replacement glass. Just give it a wipe with a lint free cloth before installing and you should be good to go. While you’re at it and your iPod or iPhone has been taken apart, you may want to consider also replacing your iPod battery at this stage to save you time and having to disassemble your device again in the future. This is especially true if you’re noticing a fall in battery life/operating times. We stock a range of replacement batteries for your iPod and iPhone.
If it all too difficult for a self install, here at Circuit Central, we do offer iPhone and iPod repair service to ensure the job is done right.
HTC 7 Mozart Disassembly Guide
Aug 26th
Here’s a guide on how to repair your HTC 7 Mozart and the step by step tutorial on the disassembly steps.
While you’re at it, you might consider performing the SD card upgrade to increase the internal memory of 8GB to as large as 32GB! You will need to reformat the card once installed (a pretty straight forward procedure).
Parts required
HTC 7 Mozart Digitizer
HTC 7 Mozart LCD screen
Tools Required
Torx T5 screwdriver
Phillips head screwdriver (Size 00450)
Opening Tool
Tweezers
New iPhone! Now watch me smash it.
Aug 18th
So you just got a new shiny iPhone. What’s the first thing you do after parting with your hard earned cash? Well smash it to bits of course! Watch these guys buy a new iphone from the Apple store and then try to break it on the table inside the store. The salesman seems more interested in the table than the fact he’s smashing his new phone against it.
Did you smash your iPhone screen? We hope not intentionally, but we do sell iPhone replacement parts as well as offer iPhone repair services if you need it. If it went under a steamroller several times, you’re on your own though!
iPhone 5 with LTE capabilities
Aug 17th
Apple has rumoured to have yet another new iPhone to be released and is said to have Long Term evolution (LTE) capabilites enabled according to BRG. What is 4G LTE? Its basically a faster network that is being rolled out for a max speed of 100Mbit/s and Apple can’t afford to sit around without a product
to support the new network. I think we all have a general idea of what the new iphone 5 will look like and finally we’re talking about something other than “when will it be released??” (its being released around Sep-Oct 2011 for the pre christmas sales for those interested). Despite a “new look” that is said the iPhone 5 will have, it is also claimed that the new iPhone will include a 8MP rear camera and dual-core processors. Besides LTE capabilites, will the new iPhone drum up as much interest as its predecessors? I guess we’ll see how many of us out there are willing to sleep on the sidewalk outside Apple stores to get their hands on the latest gadget.
Xtreamer Ultra HTPC in Australia
Aug 5th
We’re excited to have the new and much anticipated Xtremer Ultra coming in tomorrow! We’ve been holding back and waiting for feedback on this new exciting addition from the Xtreamer group. I’ve seen a few HTPCs out there but
the Xtreamer Ultra packed alot more punch with the 4GB DDR3 RAM and Nvidia ION Graphics processor to handle all of those HD movies. Being a “mini pc”, means the possibilities are endless in the way it can be configured. I’ve heard of the Ultra being used as a PVR with a quad tuner installed via one of 6 USB slots available and Windows 7 installed on this little gadget. Watch out for a full review soon once we get our hands on this little device.
iPod Touch 4th Gen. screen repair guide
Mar 23rd
An important note to remember is that the iPod touch 4th gen LCD and digitizer are both glued together by a strong adhesive and replacing them separately or separating them is not possible. We’ve seen some sellers offering the digitizer or LCD separately (and they shouldn’t), so be aware that regardless if the LCD screen or glass touch panel is broken, both will require replacing.
This one is not too difficult to install, but there is one step that is a little tricky…reconnecting the digitizer ribbon cable as it is located underneath the main board.
You can remove the entire board as shown in the video to make this step a little easier, but from experience, this is not necessary as a good set of tweezers will make life alot easier. Also when reinstalling the screen assembly back into the main frame (the last step), I found heating up the whole iPod touch with a heatgun or hairdryer again creates a better seal as it softens the adhesive surface.
Tools Required:
Heatgun or hairdryer
Anti-Static Tweezers
Non scratch iPod prying tools (or a guitar pick also works)
Parts Required:
iPod Touch 4G LCD screen assembly
How to: HTC Desire HD Disassembly
Dec 9th
Another fresh video straight from HTC on the disassembly guide for the HTC Desire HD. Removing the back camera lens cover was
the trickiest part for us as the tool is not readily available. Just try to use something similar to push out the back lense cover. This one was one of the trickier ones and separating the back LCD display module from the centre metal frame was also quite tricky. Tip of the day: Take your time with this step and don’t rush it!
Parts required:
HTC Desire HD LCD screen
HTC Desire HD Glass Touch Panel
HTC Desire Disassembly Guide
Dec 8th
Here’ s a video of the HTC di
sassembly used by HTC themselves! Video says its for a HTC “Bravo”, but this is just the name of the device sold overseas. It is identical to the Desire sold locally here in Australia. Its quite detailed and you only really need to go up to 4:50 if you are looking to replace a cracked screen or touch panel.
Parts required:
HTC Desire LCD Screen
and/or
HTC Desire Glass Touch Panel
Tools required:
Torx T5 Screwdriver
Tweezers
Small phillips head screwdriver (00×40)
Nokia N8 Disassembly Guide
Dec 3rd
A video guide on how to disassemble the Nokia N8 for repair. The repair part required below will of course be determined by what is broken.
You only really need to watch the video till 1:20 and then reverse everything to put it all back together.
Parts required:
Nokia N8 Digitizer
Nokia N8 LCD Screen
Xtreamer PRO – Larger storage capacity + 7.1 DTS TrueHD
Oct 1st
After some much anticipation, Xtreamer has finally launched their Xtreamer PRO media players and this product ticked all our boxes when it was road tested. First off, the build quality is excellent with 90% of the case made from a sleek, black brushed aluminium case which not only looks great, but helps with keeping Xtreamer PRO cool under operation (a built in fan also exists). We tested the unit’s playback capabilities with a range of files including avi, mpeg, mp4, rmvb, divX and almost every other file format the unit claimed to support and it played it all without any problems. What really interested us was the fact that the Xtreamer pro comes with an improved chipset which supports MKV (h.264) as well as Dolby DTS-TrueHD 7.1CH audio. We connected the Xtreamer Pro up to a Harmon Kardon AVR260 to test the 7.1 sound
and played back a movie file encoded in MKV (h.264) and we were pleasantly surprised at the clarity of the movie (1080p) as well as the digital sound.
The Xtreamer PRO also supports wireless-N via a USB antenna and while this wasn’t standard or included in retail packaging (it is an optional extra at $25), I suppose not everyone requires this feature and helps keep the price a little lower. We also found that the “Xtreamer Live” (or xLive) function which allowed streaming content over the Internet was also pretty cool (I really liked the internet radio feature) and we have heard that Xtreamer is putting in more work on the xLive feature to add in more channels.
Its dual bay internal storage accepts 2 x 3.5″ SATA drives which means it can hold up to a whopping 4TB of data. It also has 2 x USB host supports which allows an external USB device (such as a friend’s hard drive) to be connected to the unit and have media files played from this external drive to further extend its storage capacity. The Xtreamer Pro is a must have device for you media lovers or for those who want a digital jukebox or media centre as an addition to their home theatre setup in one small but incredibly powerful unit.
