What is an iPhone digitizer?

I know that there are a ton of question about the “digitizer” on your iPhone, or any other touch-screen smartphone these days. We here at Mission Repair are experts and very familiar with iPhone digitizers, glass, and screens. We repair them by the thousands every month. Let’s see if we can demonstrate what the digitizer is here under a glass panel:

This is the digitizer on an iPhone!

The digitizer is fused UNDER the glass cover. It’s the electronic component that senses the touch of a human finger through the glass, and is designed to allow the unit to be controlled by a fingertip. This is the “input” of the device and it’s very thin and transparent.

The point is that you cannot replace the digitizer alone. Since it’s part of the glass, in the event of a touch failure it needs to be replaced with the glass and vice versa. So if you have a cracked iPhone glass, you’re going to get a new digitizer as well. If you have an iPhone that doesn’t respond to touch, you’ll also get a new glass. It’s just the way it’s designed.

You might see these assemblies marketed as:

• iPhone glass
• iPhone digitizer
• iPhone touch screen
• iPhone glass screen
• iPhone screen
• iPhone touch panel

For all intents and purposes, these terms are all interchangeable and are all the same thing. Are you in need of one of these parts? Here’s a list of glass/digitizer repairs that we sell here at Mission Repair:

• iPhone 2G Glass Repair
• iPhone 3G Glass Repair
• iPhone 3GS Glass Repair
• iPhone 4 Glass Repair
• iPhone 4S Glass Repair
• iPhone 5 Glass Repair
• iPhone 5C Glass Repair
• iPhone 5S Glass Repair
• iPhone 6 Glass Repair
• iPhone 6 Plus Glass Repair
• iPhone 6S Glass Repair
• iPhone 6S Plus Glass Repair

Don’t forget our wide selection of iPad Glass Repair options!

Remember, you might see these glass panels for sale cheap – be sure to inquire about the required digitizer that is fused to the glass from the factory – without it, the glass is useless. You cannot replace the glass or “remove” your good digitizer and reinstall it onto your iPhone without advanced equipment and lots of training. It just doesn’t work! These assemblies are built together and must stay together. I hope this information helps!

iPhone 4 survives fall from skydiver’s pocket!

I found out about this today; but apparently last month the actual incident took place in Minnesota. I just needed to share this in case you haven’t heard about it!

Jarrod McKinney’s iPhone 4 — a notoriously fragile device — cracked when his 2-year-old knocked it off a bathroom shelf.

“I was like, ‘Man! That’s all it takes to crack the glass?’ ” he said.

So it’s easy to see why McKinney, a 37-year-old in Minnesota, would be “just absolutely shocked” when that same phone survived a fall from his pocket — while he was skydiving from 13,500 feet.

He found the gadget, its glass surfaces shattered, on top of a building about a half-mile away from where he landed with his parachute.

Joe Johnson, a skydiving instructor, said he and a few friends watched from the ground below the two-story building as McKinney raised the phone above his head in triumph after he located it using a GPS tracking app.

Just to be funny, Johnson decided to call the busted phone. He didn’t expect the call to go through. But it did. McKinney felt the phone vibrate and started laughing.

“They were all like, ‘It works! It works!'” he said of his friends watching his rooftop search from the bottom of the building.

That’s especially amazing since the iPhone 4 can suffer from cell reception issues. When the Apple smartphone debuted in 2010, a saga the tech media called “Antennagate” followed. Consumer watchdogs claimed a design flaw on the phone’s antenna caused it to drop calls unexpectedly. Apple gave out free phone cases to address the issue.

Johnson, the skydiving instructor, was so impressed with the whole ordeal that he plans to pick up one of the phones sometime soon.

“It goes to show you if I crash land and need an ambulance, they can still track me down with the GPS,” he said.

Some Android phones — Apple’s main competitors in the smartphone field — are perhaps better known for their durability. As CNN’s Mark Milian reports, Google, which makes the Android mobile operating system, launched several of its phones into space, tied to balloons.

Also, in case you were wondering if it’s weird for a skydiver to take his phone on a jump in the first place, apparently it’s not.

Well, we’ve seen phones that come into the shop looking worse than this if you can believe it. There’s no shortage of cracked glass out there, but this is a story that seems pretty extreme. I thought that I’d heard it all until today, thanks to Jarrad for sharing!

Have an iPhone 4 with a busted screen? Click here to get the repair started!

Take care, Ryan

To Repair Or Not Repair?

Hello everyone,

To repair or not repair? That is the question of the week. With every September, comes an Apple media event. With an Apple media event, comes newly released products and with newly released products comes that question. . .Should I repair this broken Smartphone screen? Some of you might be looking to switch from an Android or Windows phone, some of you might be limping along, for as long as you can, to get a glimpse of the new products before you make your decision. And some of you might be just like my friend Darrin, his iPhone 5S is perfectly fine (but he’s been living with a cracked screen for some time), but he’s the kind of guy that likes the newest product that Apple has to offer! For those of you that are saying that, this post might not be for you 🙂 So lets talk for a moment on what Apple is expected to release via the rumor mill. We are anticipating two new iPhone products. The iPhone 6 with a 4.7″ screen and the iPhone 6 with a massive 5.5″ screen.

The iPhone 6 should bring the following features:

-Rounder and thinner designs
-Tapered screens that apparently taper off at the edges
-Optical Image Stabilization for clearer pictures and a 10MP camera
-A sapphire screen for superior scratch resistance
-iOS8

So with those features in mind, the question becomes, can I live without the latest and greatest from Apple? I’m going to stay with my iPhone 5 for a while…faced with the same dilemma, it is easy to see from the information provided, that Apple is not going to release a game changer tomorrow for me.

Alright, so I know my opinion may not be that convincing, but let me shed some light on the facts of repairing over replacing:

-It is usually cheaper to repair your Smartphone, than replace (Consider the new 2 year agreement you are about to sign up for)
-It’s green (Meaning you don’t have to contribute to a growing worldwide e-waste problem)
-You don’t have to deal with the hassle of moving over all of your data over (I recently had to do this…not fun)
-It most cases, you are supporting a local business

Ok, so if you are dead tired of your old iPhone 3GS or Samsung GS3 and are just ready for something new, let me make a case for you. Did you know that you could sell that old Smartphone? You can find many business that will buy your old device from you. You could also sell them yourself on eBay or Craigslist and Apple has even started their own trade in program so you can use that against the purchase of new products in their retail stores. In every case, you will make substantially more with a fully functioning Smartphone than a broken one. It logical.

I hope this sheds some light on why its a good thing to repair instead of completely replace your smartphone when an event like tomorrow is upon us. If you choose to repair and keep, repair and replace or repair and give away as a gift, the common denominator here is REPAIR! Don’t let that smartphone end up in the garbage or in your bottom drawer for years to come!

Take care, Ryan

Top 5 ways to ruin your iPhone.

Hello friends-

Ruin is a strong word, I should say “ruin your day”, because in all of these cases, the iPhone can be fixed! It’s why we are in business.

I thought it was time for us to run some data through our system and come up with the top 5 ways our customers have reported damaging their iPhones. This data is similar for iPods and Android phones. Without much more to say, let’s see what and why things are happening to our customers in real life!

We will start with #5:

5. It just happened.

Unfortunately we hear this a lot. “I set the phone down and the next time I picked it up, the screen was cracked”. Or, “I left my phone in the car overnight, and now it won’t turn on.” These types of issues are a mystery. Spontaneous breakages. I think it’s the aliens that did it. In reality, a lot of issues happen without us ever knowing why; it’s no secret that electronic devices will all eventually fail naturally over time.

4. Animal ate it.

Well, I can’t really say “ate it”, but truthfully there are many times that either the family dog thought the device was a chew toy, but we are also going to include dogs stepping on devices in this one. We hear this a lot: “my dog stepped on my iPad” and the next thing you know is that we’ve had to replace a cracked glass on the device.

3. Pulled by the cord while plugged in.

It’s never a good idea to plug your iPhone in then string the cord across the hallway so that your iPhone is sitting on a table. This is a recipe for disaster, and now that white cable that you treasure so preciously just became a tripwire for the next unsuspecting passerby. This issue causes a lot of cracked screens and charging port problems.

2. Liquid Damaged.

I just heard this on Friday: “I had my iPhone in my back pocket, started to pull down my pants to use the restroom…and ker-plunk my iPhone went into the toilet.” We love these (not really). Truthfully clean toilet water in the iPhone doesn’t scare me that much; but some of my technicians might think otherwise. Spilling a glass of water, jumping into a swimming pool with an iPhone in your pocket, or dropping your iPhone into a glass of beer at a Rolling Stones concert have all been reported.

AND THE NUMBER ONE REASON IS……………..

1. Dropped!

There’s not much more to say about this one. Drops are clearly the number one reason that customers call into Mission Repair for service. Some customers even state “I dropped my iPhone from about 3 feet onto the carpet. I can’t believe that it cracked!”. Believe it. To be honest I dropped my iPhone AGAIN this weekend (I left it in my lap while driving my truck, then just got out and forgot it was there) and it fell onto the concrete driveway. I watched it for a minute, picked it up and it was still in tact. Somehow. I think that I have 9 lives like a cat when it comes to things like this, but I’m on #8.

And there you have it. Straight from the customer’s experience. Let me give you one more “abstract” testimonial from a long-time customer of ours that flies with the Blue Angels Navy Team. Lt. Amy Tomlinson took her trusty MacBook with her on a flight, and slammed the canopy of her F/A-18 Hornet crushing the screen. She called us at Mission Repair and we got her back in working order in no time. I’ve recently talked with Lt. Tomlinson and asked her about that MacBook. She was proud to say the she upgraded herself into a new unit; but the original “smashed then repaired” laptop was still being used by her mother after several years. That’s just awesome!

Have a great week, I’ll be back soon.

Ryan

Own a “vintage” phone?

Hello friends, I just watched a video on CNN.com that talked about the fad of owning and using a “vintage” cell phone. This was work related, so watching videos while at work is ok in this situation 😉

Apparently there is a new trend in cell phones – one that is making it “cool” to use an older, greyscale, non-smart phone as a sign and symbol of the times. I think that I might be one of the users that would quite possibly lean toward a “less-smart” smartphone – personally I’ve got so many means of communication with the outside world including through this blog I’m writing, that my cell phones seem to be on “offense” at all times. Yes, I have 2 phones, both set up and designed for very different purposes. Gulp.

In fact, I recently removed my email from my iPhone altogether and I’m a much happier man for it. I know, it’s strange…I just wait until I get to the office!

I find it a bit distracting when I’m out at a restaurant and see everyone swiping their phones; reading, texting, gaming or whatever. In my opinion it’s not a bad idea to take a break from the technology and look up once in a while.

UK manufacturer, Binatone, is making a new “Brick” phone. That’s right, it’s similar to the one that in the picture above, but it’s actually new and you can buy them now. Simple technology and a fashion statement to boot that come in several colors. There’s a caveat – you won’t get the smartphone experience. Not being able to Tweet or visit Facebook might freak you out for a minute but let’s face it, what did you do before Twitter and Facebook were around?

There’s a plus to older phones. Not only are they nostalgic but with the lack of a full-face glass screen they seemed indestructible. I can’t tell you how many times I dropped my old Blackberry on the ground and it NEVER failed. One drop of an iPhone and you’ll need to send it into us for glass repair. It’s how and why we are in business.

Are you willing to lose your smart features? Well that’s your call – no pun intended.

Happy talking, Ryan