Rebuilding an iPhone

I started tinkering with a couple broken iPhones during a conference call yesterday.

I had received the broken iPhones from two friends that I work with.  One of the iPhones died by drowning (completely submerged and subsequently fried) and the other by paralysis – it had lost the use of its usb connection.  Plugging the paralyzed iPhone into a computer would result in the computer claiming that the USB port would be turned off due to excessive power draw.

With nothing but a razor blade and a flat head screw driver that was way too large for anything other than prying things apart I set off…

After 30 minutes I had successfully taken apart the paralyzed iPhone, leaving everything fairly unscathed.  Unfortunately I didn’t see anything wrong with phone – all of the parts looked fine at first glance.  There were only two possibilities for resurrection of these two phones – either replace the battery in the drown victim or replace the connector in the paralyzed iPhone.

So I set off on taking apart the drown victim, and 40 minutes later I had it taken apart.  Three things stood out about the drown victim compared to the paralyzed victim:

1. The drown victim had been beaten before being submerged:  The aluminum casing was fairly dented around the edges, which made removing the aluminum casing extremely difficult with my barbarian tools.  I sort of ruined the aluminum in the process of removing it.
2. The drown victim was DIRTY: the insides were full of dirt and grime around the outer edges.
3. The drown victim had a fried battery and the battery was ruined in the process of removing it.  It was very… sticky.  The soldered contacts for the battery were also covered in gunk, probably from the battery frying.
4. The drown victim’s connector area was a little bit different. Wait a minute….

And that’s when I realized where the paralyzed victim had met its doom.  When removing the USB connector from the drown victim I noticed that things were a little more difficult to pull apart.  The ribbon cable that attaches to the connector and to the home button was more “put together” than the paralyzed iPhone.  Looking back at the paralyzed victim I saw that a rip had occurred:

I quickly replaced this whole section and voila!  The paralyzed victim got its limb back.  Working iPhone!