Adventures in amateur BlackBerry repair

Taking apart a BlackBerry PearlLast night as I was walking home I pulled my BlackBerry Pearl 8120 out of my back pocket and noticed that the LCD was cracked (image here). I have no idea how this happened — I didn’t drop it or anything. The phone is only two weeks old! Unfortunately, no matter how it happened I knew T-Mobile wasn’t going to have much sympathy for my plight. T-Mobile, like most carriers, considers any screen breakage to be the customer’s fault, and it’s not covered by warranty.

This particular Pearl, however, was a replacement for my old Pearl — an earlier model 8100 — which I accidentally dropped in the toilet about two weeks ago. And that gave me an idea: Why not swap out the broken screen in the new Pearl with the working screen from the old one? » More... »