Some helpful information about phone repairs

A blog post we’ve been meaning to make for a while. We thought we could share some useful information here based on things we see and hear every day at work. Some of the information may seem very obvious to some people but not to others.

1) Rice will not fix your water damaged phone:

Something we see all too frequently is customers bringing in their phones in bags of rice that have been liquid damaged. The rice tends to just get stuck in the ports and thats about as far as it goes. Yes rice has the ability to absorb liquid but the issue is that the liquid combined with electricity running through the phone damages the motherboard and generally requires motherboard repair to repair/replace chips/circuits. No amount of rice will be able to fix these things.

Some people will claim their phone was ‘fixed’ by the rice but the likelihood is the liquid just didn’t reach the motherboard and would have dried out without rice in a hot press. If your phone does fall into water. Turn it off, if it hasn’t gone off already. Leave it off. DO NOT CHARGE! Bring it into your local repair centre asap.

2) Shops that charge to “perform diagnostics”:

Something we hear all too frequently from our customers is that many phone repair stores are now charging to diagnose issues with a phone before repair. In our opinion, no reputable phone repair business should be charging for this. Phone problems for the most part can be diagnosed within 5 minutes but many shops will send customers away for hours while they perform “diagnostics” and charge them for the service. Laptops and computers are a different story as software related issues can take time to diagnose but with mobile phones it is generally much more straight forward.

3) Drop proof covers:

We’re often asked about the best covers to protect phones from breaking. Customers particularly after breaking their screens and paying big money to change them want guarantees in the shape of a phone cover. The truth is that some phone cases will give you a better chance than others but its a lot to do with luck in our experience. We’ve had people with brand new iPhones with the biggest toughest “builders” cover smash to smithereens in their pocket with no knowledge of how it could have happened. We’ve had others who have dropped their phone with no cover from two stories up on a ladder and their phone has been perfect. Others drop on to carpet from a foot and their phone breaks etc. The bottom line is a cover and screen protector will certainly help when it comes to a drop but there are no guarantees and a lot of luck is involved.

4) My iPhone/iPad suddenly stopped working:

A very frequent issue we see is iPhones freezing. They may freeze while on and become unresponsive or they may freeze when the screen is off. Plugging into a charger doesn’t work and pressing the power button doesn’t either. Before you panic, try holding the home and power button together for about 10-15 seconds. This will force the phone to restart. This often solves the issue and could save you a trip running down to your local repair centre.

5) Why its important to only use genuine Apple cables for charging iPhones:

A repair we’re performing all too frequently is motherboard repair of the U2IC. Its an expensive and time consuming job and can be easily avoided. It pains us to encourage people to only use Apple products but in this case in our experience it is important. Apple original cables have a voltage regulator chip in the head of the cable. Many of the cheap cables that people tend to buy to save themselves from buying those desperately expensive Apple cables don’t have this chip and that can stress the U2IC chip on the motherboard. This is independent to Apple phones and we have not encountered the same issue with other brands.

6) Make a secure note of your Apple ID username and password:

This may seem very obvious but we have about 3-5 calls and visits a week from people who cannot remember their Apple ID and password. Unless you can provide Apple an original purchase receipt and prove to them its your phone you will not be able to remove the Apple ID and password. Yes you can try the secret questions and answers/forgot my password but failing that there is no way to get around this.

7) If you have important photos/contacts/data don’t keep the only copy on your phone back them up now!:

The amount of people we encounter who keep one copy of critically important information on their phones/laptops is staggering. We’ve had women in tears over lost wedding/kid photos, men losing their heads over lost messages relating to court cases and the list goes on. Data recovery is really expensive and sometimes not possible if a phones hard drive is banjaxed or the hard drive in your laptop dies suddenly. Make backups!

8) Replacement screens and quality:

There are huge differences in the quality levels in replacement phone screens. A lot of people are happy to go into Moore st and pay as little as possible once it works but the rubbish some places supply is ridiculous. The age old saying goes “you buy cheap, you buy twice” and its very apparent in the phone repair industry. Cheap cheap screens tend to break much easier, their lcds picture clarity is not as sharp and they often have touch sensitivity issues. With Apple there are thousands of different replacement screens on the market at various prices.

No third party phone repair shops use genuine Apple screens!

Many shops will tell you that they use “original Apple” screens but the truth is they don’t. Apple do not sell replacement parts to third parties. You may find a shop that has a hybrid screen that has say an Apple LCD but the digitizer (the glass) will be a spurious one.

How do you know which shops are good and use quality replacement parts we hear you ask? Use Google and look at the reviews of the shop you’re thinking of using. If they don’t have a website and/or google reviews then avoid them. For Apple make sure the company is using ‘Grade A’ screens at the least.

When it comes to Samsung the hard truth is that their screens are much more expensive to replace and thats just something you need to known when owning a Samsung. Buying spurious screens for Samsung does not pay either, they still tend to be expensive and in our experience the quality is awful which is why we wont use them. When replacing a Samsung screen we recommend to only use genuine Samsung replacement screens. The same is to be said of Sony.

9) What is the best phone on the market in your opinion?

A question we get every day and an answer that may surprise people.

We’ve owned iPhones, Sony, Samsung, HTC and Xiaomi but the brand that has our attention right now is OnePlus. Without going into a rant about how much we love their phones, they basically offer all of the features and functionality of the flagship iPhones/Samsungs for a lot less money and with no sacrifices. We’re using the OnePlus 5 and we’d go as far as to say its the best phone we’ve ever owned.

We’ll leave it there for now but if anyone has any questions about what we’ve spoken about or other phone repair related things feel free to email us at info@e-tech.ie

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