As you can see, the iPhone 4 & 4S variants are a bit more squarish in design and have a front facing camera. Something that is lacking on the 3G/3GS versions. Here’s a quick cheat sheet to let you know which versions you have:

• iPhone 4S: Square in shape. Glass back. Front & back camera. Model number on back cover is A1387.
• iPhone 4 – AT&T: Looks just like the iPhone 4S except the serial number on the back is A1332. It also has a SIM tray on the right side.
• iPhone 4 – Verizon/Sprint: Looks just like the iPhone 4S except the serial number on the back is A1249 and it does not have a SIM card tray on the right side.
• iPhone 3GS: Plastic back. No front camera. Back text is the same shiny silver as the Apple logo.
• iPhone 3G: Looks just like the 3GS except the back text is a dull silver instead of shiny.

So if you’re looking for an iPhone repair or a case for your iPhone, hopefully this guide will help you figure out exactly which version you have.

Before starting, let me say that customer service requirements at different companies are not going to be the same. For example, a one man consulting company with 5 or 6 major clients doesn’t need much of a system at all. A large company like AT&T, with millions of customers, will need a very expensive system for keeping track of everything. Jet City Device Repair is neither of these.

For those of you that don’t know us, we’re a small iPhone repair company that sees 500-600 new customers a month and responds to about a thousand inquiries. Unlike consulting companies, cable companies, or department stores, we don’t get a lot of repeat business – most people don’t break their iPhone on a regular basis. So it is critical for us to be able to respond to potential customers quickly or we risk losing their business to our competitors.

Here are the 5 biggest customer service challenges our system attempts to solve:

1. We need to answer phone calls on the first customer call because potential customers don’t leave voicemails. If we don’t answer the phone, they hang up and call one of our competitors.
2. We have to respond to emails in a prompt manner. Even if it’s the 3rd or 4th email in a chain and a different employee is in front of the computer, they have to be able to answer quickly and correctly.
3. Keeping track of past conversations or sales. People expect you to remember them – even if the person talking to them isn’t the same person that interacted with them before.
4. Sharing information between employees. If you don’t want to sound like an idiot when talking to a past or potential customer, you have to have some way of making sure information given out by one employee can be recalled by another employee in the future. Quick note here: In most cases, we’ll only talk to a customer 2 to 4 times – we don’t have a super long relationship with them.
5. A limited budget. This means inexpensive or, better yet, free options are great for us.

The Tools

At Jet City Device Repair, we are big Google users. There’s three major reasons for this: They have great tools, they have a variety of tools, and most are free. Here’s a quick summary of what you will need to implement our system:

1. Google Apps. This includes Gmail, Google Calendars, and Google Docs. You will be relying heavily on all three of these tools. It can be a bit tricky to setup and does require a modicum of technical work. Don’t be worried, though. It’s pretty easy. Google has a decent help sheet on the topic and your web hosting company should also have some information on it. Getting it setup properly will allow you to have emails like sales@yourcompany.com as well as accessing your mail by going to http://mail.yourcompany.com.
2. Google Voice. You will get a phone number from Google with your local area code. You then give that number to your customers (on your website, business cards, phone book, business directories, etc). You then set Google Voice up to ring whichever phone or phones you want when the number is called. There’s also some cool rules setting that allows you to configure certain numbers to be called at certain times of the day and more.
3. Mobile phone with good access to Google. I personally have an Android phone so Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs are pretty easy for me to access without much work. If you’re an iPhone user, you can setup your iPhone to access Gmail and your Google Calendar. You can then use the built in web browser to access Google docs. If you have a Blackberry, sell it right now and get an iPhone or Android phone.

Now for one of the coolest parts about these tools: With the exception of a mobile phone, all of this is free! That’s right, you don’t have to pay a dime to use any of the Google tools (you can if you want, but the free versions should be plenty to get you started).

The Setup

Once you have the necessary tools, it’s time to plug them all together. This part is easy.

1. Setup a generic Google Apps account for your business. We use sales@jetcitydevices.com. This is where customers will send and receive all emails from. It will also get you a common calendar and Google Spreadsheet.
2. Share the login and password for your generic account with everyone that will be doing customer service. This will allow them to log in to the system from anywhere at any time.
3. Create a number of important labels within the Google Mail system. We have one label for each customer service representative, a call back label, waiting for parts (we sometimes run out of a particular part and call the customer back when it comes in), and a customer review label (where we put customer feedback). Your business might have other labels. The trick is to make sure that the inbox of your generic customer service email is always empty. Anything left in the inbox should be unread and considered important to deal with as soon as possible.
4. Setup a Google Docs spreadsheet for tracking customers. This can take several forms but at the minimum you’ll want a column for the person’s name, contact info (either email or phone), the date they were last contacted, and some notes. You might want to have multiple tabs in the document to track things like customers, leads, warranty issues, and/or old contacts.
5. Setup your Google Voice voicemail message. While you’re going to try to make sure no one ever hears your voicemail (because you’re answering their calls) it will happen. So record a voicemail letting them know if they leave a message, someone will call them back as soon as possible. Then, make sure that all voicemails are emailed to the generic company email.
6. Setup your Google Voice account to ring at least the office phone and, if you’re like us, one other phone that someone is likely to be able to answer should the first number be busy or the office closed. This is critical – you want to make sure as many phone calls as possible get answered without going to voicemail so the more phones plugged into your Google Voice number the better.

At this point, you’re ready to get started.

The Process

Dealing with Email

The basic concept of our email is this: If anything is in the inbox, it should be unread or has just been read and is being dealt with. In other words, if anyone opens up the inbox from some other computer (or phone) they don’t touch an email that has already been read but assume that every other message needs immediate attention. The goal is to keep the inbox empty and, if it’s not empty, to make it empty as quick as possible.

If an email has been dealt with completely (no more action necessary) the email is simply archived (which removes it from the inbox but still keeps it around forever so it can be recalled if needed). If the email needs to be handled by someone in particular (such as a manager), the email is marked as unread and moved to the appropriate label for that person. The next time that person logs in, they’ll see they have unread messages in their label and they should deal with it. If the email needs further follow-up  we again mark the email as unread and move it to the appropriate follow-up label.

Dealing with Voicemail

We’ll talk about dealing with phone calls next but for now, let’s assume someone called in the middle of the night and left a voicemail. This is what’s cool about having Google Voice and hooking it up to your Gmail (see step #5 above) – you can now treat voicemails just like emails. If they’re in the inbox and marked unread, they haven’t been dealt with yet and need to be ASAP. Once they’re listened to and handled, they are archived or marked as unread and moved to the appropriate label. Simple as pie.

Dealing with Phone Calls

In our business, fixing broken iPhones for people, many people want to call before bringing in their phone. People just want to know they can trust someone before they hand them their baby and let them tear it apart. I would guess that around 70% of all our customers call before coming. If we don’t answer the phone, they call one of our competitors instead. In other words, in our business, it is absolutely critical that we answer the phone when someone calls. Failure to do so means lost business.

To make sure as many people as possible get their call answered, we have setup our Google Voice to simultaneously ring both our office phone and that of one of our managers. In addition, the manager’s phone is set to ring early in the morning before we open – we probably get about 5-7 phone calls every morning before we open. The result of this is that even if the manager is off for the day, he can still help answer the phones both before we open and when our technicians are swamped with repairs.

The one problem with having someone answer the phone when they’re not actually at work is that they need some way to communicate the information discussed with the customer to the guys currently working in the shop. They can do this either through a computer or, if they don’t have access to a computer, through their cellphone. This is why it’s important to have a cellphone that integrates well with Google.

A manager’s cellphone has access to our company calendar, so they can schedule a repair on the spot for a customer and the guys in the shop will immediately see it. They can also send a quick email to the generic email address with any important notes and the guys in the shop will handle it like any other message coming into the inbox.

And what if the customer has talked to us before? Or is calling about a problem with their repair? Any technician can simply ask the customer to hold for a moment and then, either through a computer or cell phone, take a look at the necessary Google Document, find the customer, read the notes, and then resume the conversation with the customer and sound like an intelligent person. When the conversation is over, they can make additional notes so future conversations with the customer go equally smoothly.

Make it a Formal Process

Whatever customer service tool you end up using there is one more piece that you have to have in place to make it work: Create a formal process and get every employee trained on exactly how it works and make sure they do it. Without this last piece, the best and most expensive system in the world will not work. If employees don’t take notes, don’t put things in the calendar, don’t answer the phone, or let emails sit for days in the inbox; this system, or any other, will fail. You have to have consistency across every person in your organization. So if you decide to implement this system, or any other, make sure that every single person is aware of exactly how the customer service pieces fit together and what is expected of them.

An Example: From Lead to Sale to Warranty Issue

First let me say that warranty issues are extremely rare for us but, like any business, they do occasionally  happen and that process will let me really show how our system works from start to end.

It all begins when a customer calls to inquire about our pricing. They call while our shop technician is on the phone with another customer. The result is that our manager’s phone rings. He answers it just like he was in the office. The customer asks for the price, how long it will take, our location, etc. The manager, who happens to be at the grocery store at the time, answers all these questions and asks if the customer wants to schedule an appointment. They agree and our manager looks on his phone at the day’s calendar and finds a time that is open and works for the customer. He then puts the customer in the calendar and the conversation ends.

The technician in our shop, who is now off the phone, sees the new appointment appear in the company calendar an knows not to schedule anyone else in that slot.

Later in the day the customer comes in and has their phone fixed. When the process is done our technician enters the customer into the Google Spreadsheet with the date, the repair, and any notes that might be important.

Two weeks later the customer emails to say they have a problem with the repair. This email comes in at 8am when we’re not open. Our technician starts his shift later in the day and sees the email. He immediately responds to the customer saying that we’d be happy to fix it for them at not cost and asks when they’d like to come in. At the same time, the technician puts a note in the Google Doc for this customer saying what was wrong.

The customer doesn’t respond to our email until the next day when a different technician is working. This new technician sees the email, reads the entire thread to make sure he’s up to date, and also checks the Google Doc for any other notes. The customer has requested an appointment for the following Saturday to come in. This second technician puts the appointment in the shared calendar and emails the customer back to say it’s all setup.

Saturday rolls around and yet another technician is working. They see this warranty customer in the calendar with complete details about what’s wrong with the phone. When the customer comes in, the technician is waiting for them, knows what’s wrong, has everything in place to fix it as quickly as possible, and gets it fixed. The customer then leaves happy and we put a quick note in our Google Doc stating how everything went.

Conclusion

Using Google tools any small-to-medium sized company can build a fairly robust customer service system. This will insure that customers get serviced quickly and properly. It will not only insure less headaches for your organization, but will lead to more sales and happier customers. This will almost certainly help to differentiate you from your competitors and get people talking about what a great company you are to deal with because, let’s face it, most companies suck at customer service. Don’t be one of them!

Disastrous Repair

It all started when a very nice gentleman named Gregg, who lives in Toledo, dropped his Droid 2 Global and took it to a local repair shop. They assured him they could fix it. They lied. They had his phone for over a month, he shelled out $60 for parts, and they almost destroyed the phone. When he received the phone back – a month later – its brand new touchscreen didn’t work at all. A touchscreen phone without a working touchscreen isn’t much good.

That was when Gregg found our website and gave us a call. I told him we didn’t know if we could fix it or not at this point, but that we’d take a look and see what we could do. He mailed us out the phone and we received it a couple of days later. As the pictures in this post show, it was a disaster. You can see from one picture that the ribbon cable that connects the two halves of the phone was all torn up and patched over with electrical tape. The second picture shows the connector for the touchscreen. You will notice that the small ribbon cable plugged into the connector is way too small. That’s because it’s the wrong part! The screen the company used was meant for a Droid 2 and not the Droid 2 Global – they are different parts.

What you can’t see from those two pictures are the 6 missing screws, the missing rubber grommet that allows the proximity sensor to work was missing (the proximity sensor turns the phone’s screen off when you hold it up to your ear), and the fingerprints and dust all over the LCD (the LCD is what displays the phones picture).

I personally handled this phone and it took me about 90 minutes to get everything squared away and working again (a normal cracked Droid screen repair takes us about 30 minutes to fix – far less than a month). I started with completely replacing the ribbon cable that connects the two halves of the phone. Then I replaced the touchscreen with an actual Droid 2 Global screen and cleaned off the LCD. Lastly, I used some specially cut neoprene padding to replace the missing rubber grommet on the proximity sensor. Once everything was put back together, the phone fired up and worked like new again!

So the moral of the story is to be careful and diligent about choosing who you let fix your cell phone. Here are a few quick tips about that:

1. Make sure you’re dealing with a reputable company. Do they have a website? Do they have an actual office space (versus a guy working in his basement)? Do they have a business license? How long have they been in business?
2. Give them a call and talk with them. This isn’t fool proof but it can give you some reassurance about the people that will be pulling your $400+ phone apart.
3. What kind of guarantees do they offer? Do they warranty their work? Do they promise that if they can’t fix it they’ll refund you your money? If they actually wreck your phone, do they promise to buy a new one?
4. Check out their references. Hopefully they will have a Yelp or Facebook page and there will be some reviews and comments about their service. Do a little Google search on their business and see what you can find out.
5. Make sure they’ve actually fixed your type of phone before. If so, it should be posted on their website, they should be able to talk intelligently about the repair, and you should be able to find someone online that mentions them doing the repair.

If you do about 15 minutes worth of due diligence, you should be able to get a pretty good feel for whether or not someone is a legitimate and honest cell phone repair company. There are some very good cell phone repair companies out there. Unfortunately, there are a lot more bad ones. So be careful and choose wisely.

Fixing your own phone is harder than the online videos make it look.

Not only that, but if you mess it up, you may end up with a phone that is beyond repair for even the professionals. I’m speaking to you here with more than just my financial interest in mind. I really do think that for most people, having a professional repair your phone is the best, cheapest, and least frustrating way to go.

The philosophy of that last sentence comes from experience. I’ve had more than a few people show up at our office with a phone that, the day before just had a cracked screen and now has a busted LCD, a torn ribbon cable or two, and the new touchscreen still isn’t installed.

A big part of this belief in the ease of a self-repair comes from watching the online videos of the repair. I’ve seen a lot of those videos, and I can tell you for a fact that the phones their “fixing” in those videos have already been pulled apart and then reassembled to make the video go more smoothly.

The reason? Those videos are usually made by the companies selling the individual parts and they have a vested interest in making the repair look as easy as possible to do. If they can convince you it’s pretty simple to do, then you’ll buy the part from them and give it a shot.

Beware: When you go to pull your phone apart, it will not just separate the way they do in those videos. In addition, they conveniently end all of the videos at the point where the phone is pulled apart. They don’t continue and show you how to reassemble the whole thing. Trust me when I say that putting the phone back together is often far harder than pulling it apart.

One example of this is the iPhone 4. Doing a screen repair on the iPhone 4 requires removing about 25 screws and almost all of them are of different sizes. You need a system for tracking which parts go where or it will take you forever to put things back together.

Or consider the Motorola Atrix. Getting the cracked screen off of an Atrix is pretty easy. However, getting the new touchscreen on is unbelievably difficult the first time you do it – the connector is only about 1/2 inch long and doesn’t fit through the hole it is supposed to go through without some serious effort. The online repair videos conveniently leave that step out.

Then there are phones like the HTC Evo or MyTouch 4G that have the front glass taped directly to the LCD underneath (the LCD is what displays your phone’s picture and in most cases is working perfectly even with a cracked touchscreen glass). If you watch the YouTube videos for these repairs, they just wave a hair dryer over the cracked glass and it pops right off the LCD. No problem, right? Wrong! The only reason it comes off so easy in the videos is because they’ve already pulled the glass off, put it back on, and then take it off again for the camera. If you’re not extremely careful doing the real life repair, it’s pretty easy to break the LCD while removing the glass and then you’re going to be out another $50-$75 replacing that part, too.

And don’t even get me started on the difference in parts quality online…

There’s no doubt that it’s possible to fix your cell phone yourself. You can buy the parts and tools off Ebay (or some other site) and then find a good repair video online. If you’re handy with electronics or just out for a challenge, this will not only save you some money, but could be kind of fun. But for most people, it’s going to be frustrating, tedious, kind of scary, and may very well end up costing you more money than if you’d had someone else fix it for you right away.

We think this new move will be great for us and even better for our customers. We’re just a few blocks east of the Fullerton Avenue exit off of I-90/94 and a 10 minute walk west of the Red/Brown/Purple line stop on Fullerton. In other words, it’s easy to get to by car or by train.

The only thing that has changed is our address and shop. We are still offering the same repair services on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry phones and still have the same well trained staff on hand. However, this new location is much convenient for those living in or near downtown Chicago. In addition, we’re pretty excited about the new shop layout. We think it looks pretty sharp. Come on in and check it out for yourself. We’d love your comments.

We offer the repair both through the mail and at our Seattle location. If you’re sending it through the mail, we get it fixed for you in about 24 hours after we receive it. Walk-in customers to our shop can expect to have it done in under an hour.

This screen repair option can save you a significant amount of money over buying a new phone – which is exactly what most T-Mobile dealerships will tell people is your only option. The problem with this is that, once under a 2-year contract, you’ll have to pay full price for the phone. This means buying a new HTC G2 will cost $500.

We frequently get customers with cracked screens that have already been to their T-Mobile dealership and are sticker shocked to find out the phone they got for $150 when they signed a 2-year contract now costs more than 3 times that to replace. Our basic glass repair, which is by far the most common problem for the G2, costs just $85 at the moment. That’s a pretty big savings!

For people interested in getting their HTC G2 screen fixed, you can check out our G2 repair page, send us an email, or even give us a call at (800) 272-0897.

To give you an idea, within a week Christmas, when we weren’t even fixing the device yet, we had received a bunch of calls from customers asking if we could fix their iPod Touch 4. Let me put that in perspective: We had no advertising or even a page on our website dedicated to a cracked iPod Touch 4 and yet demand for the repair outstripped every other device we fix except the iPhone!

We have now been fixing the iPod Touch 4 since February and I can tell you why we got so many calls: It is unbelievably fragile, easily dropped, and the #1 owners are kids under the age of 15. Those three factors make this device, while beautiful and powerful, very prone to damage.

One of the big reasons for this fragility is the construction of the iPod Touch 4. It is extremely thin, slippery, has a large glass surface, and the steel frame that holds the glass in place is not very strong. That weak steel frame is particularly troublesome. It’s quite common for us to fix the cracked glass on someone’s 4th generation iPod Touch and it the metal frame will actually be bent and deformed from a 3 foot fall.

With the 8GB model costing $229 and the 64GB model listing for $399, this “small” fall can have a big financial cost. So the question is, what do you do?

First, if you decide to buy an iPod Touch 4, get a good case for it. My personal recommendation is the Speck Pixelskin for the iPod Touch 4. It costs just $25 and it is constructed from rubber (which is a great shock absorber), is reinforced in the corners, and has a small lip all the way around the glass screen. All of these features mean great protection for your iPod Touch. We sell a lot of these Speck Pixelskin cases for our iPhone repair customers and extremely few of them come back for another repair.

Secondly, Apple offers a non-warranty repair service on their iPods. The service starts at $99 for the 8GB version and goes up to $199 for the 64GB version. The one thing I don’t understand in their non-warranty repair description is the following line: “Service may not be available if your iPod has been damaged due to accident or abuse.” Since the phone was damaged due to an accident it appears that Apple might say they can’t fix it once they receive it. In addition, they are not likely to send you back your iPod but a different one. Again from their site: “Replacement iPods may be new, used or refurbished.” This means that any data you had on your iPod Touch would be lost (so make sure to back up your data if you go this route).

Lastly, if your iPod Touch 4 has been dropped and the glass cracked, you can get it repaired. Our iPod Touch 4 screen repair costs $109 at the moment (for all models of the iPod Touch 4) but I expect that price to come down in the near future as the prices on parts starts to drop (we’re actually in the process of evaluating parts from a new supplier that are quite a bit less expensive than our current supplier). We keep these parts in stock so we can fix your iPod for you in under 24 hours. That means it’ll take about a week, with shipping, for the entire repair process. In addition, we actually fix your iPod Touch and don’t send you a refurbished one. This means all of your data should stay in tact.

Bottom line: The 4th generation of the iPod Touch is a great device but it is extremely fragile. So if you’re going to drop a few hundred dollars on one, spend the extra $25 and get a case for it. And if something does happen to it, don’t fret, there are repair options that can save you a lot of money over buying a new one.

His promotion is a direct result of a tremendous increase in the volume of repairs we’ve seen recently. In the past year, our Seattle walk-in repair business has increased by over 40% and our mail-in cell phone repair business has gone up by over 400%!

According to Tom Lorimor, our owner that runs the Seattle shop, our business has grown so much in the past year that it has gotten impossible for just him to keep growing the business and continue to provide the great service we want to offer our customers. That’s why we’ve decided to promote John. He’s not only a top-notch cell phone repair technician, but he is great with customers, dedicated to his work, and has all the tools to help us keep growing Jet City Device Repair without sacrificing our service and support.

John’s new duties will include helping us handle incoming customer service requests via the main company email and 800 number, taking over the duties of ordering parts from vendors, and being the first line of support for other JCD Repair employees. In addition, he has already begun to work with the Tom and I to help develop processes that will help make the company run smoother and result in an even better experience for customers.

From John himself: “I’m excited to take a more hands-on role in the daily management of our Seattle shop. I know we’ve got a lot of potential as a company, and I’m looking forward to helping us reach that potential. Today, Seattle. Tomorrow, the world!”

If you know John at all, you will realize that last sentence was also followed by: “Mwhahaha Mwhahaha.” Tom and I are lucky to have him!

The thing is, as long as the iPhone didn’t break, everyone loved it! This meant that all of Apple’s competitors had to start putting big, beautiful, glass touchscreens on their phones. The result has been many amazing new cell phones arriving to market the past few years. But along with all the great features, comes the drawback of much more fragile phones.

At Jet City Device Repair, we know this first-hand because we have fixed thousands of broken cell phone screens and I can assure you it’s not just an iPhone problem. We see the entire line of Verizon Droid phones, the Samsung Galaxy S, the new MyTouch 4G, Motorola Atrix, and many more.

The question is, what to do if your cell phone screen breaks? A lot of people’s initial reaction is to go back to the store they bought it in and try to get it fixed or replaced. Unfortunately, all cell phone carriers consider a broken screen to be a non-warranty issue so they won’t replace your phone for free. If you’re lucky, they’ll at least tell you how to get your phone fixed through the manufacturer. Apple, HTC, and Motorola all offer non-warranty repairs that range from $75-$200 (plus shipping) depending on the phone. This option can be good but it tends to be expensive and can take 2-4 weeks.

Another option is buying a new phone. This is a horrible option. That iPhone 4 you just bought for $199 is going to cost you $499 or more to replace now that you’re under a two-year contract. So that brings us to the last two options: Try to fix the phone yourself or have a 3rd party fix it for you.

Do-It-Yourself Cell Phone Repair

If done right, this will be your least expensive option. If done wrong, this option can have you pulling your hair apart and then spending even more money than simply buying a new phone. If you’re confident you can do it, the necessary parts and tools can usually be found on Ebay and often there will be a video showing how to take the phone apart.

A quick warning about the repair videos. Most of them are done by companies trying to sell you parts. Because of this, they have an incentive to make the repair look simple. They often take the phone apart before hand, loosen the necessary adhesives, put the phone back together, and then redo the “repair” for the camera. Trust me, the phone will not pull apart as easily as they make it look. Also, you’ll notice that many of these videos stop as soon as the phone is taken apart and don’t show you how to put it back together again. The reassembly is often the hardest part.

That said, if you’re familiar with small electronics repair or just have a knack for fixing things, this can not only be an inexpensive route to go but even a little bit of fun. The big catch is that if you don’t do it right, you might go from a phone that still worked, but had an ugly crack in the glass, to a phone that doesn’t work at all anymore. We have seen more than one upset woman come into our shop with a phone that her boyfriend convinced her he could fix only to leave her with a phone that’s in pieces and not working at all. About half the time we can fix the damage, but the other half the phone is little more than a paperweight.

Hiring a 3rd Party Repair Shop

Make no mistake – I am very biased on this option. Let’s just get this disclaimer out in the open right away: I have a financial interest in people choosing to have us fix their phone. That said, I really do believe that for the vast majority of people, this is the best option. It’s a lot less expensive than a new phone, often less expensive and almost always a lot faster than a manufacturer repair, and, if it’s a reputable company doing the work, they will guarantee the repair will be done right.

I have personally fixed thousands of cell phones, and I can tell you that every single smartphone has something that makes the repair difficult. Our policy is to buy a broken phone and fix that before we start fixing that particular phone for customers. I do this personally and my business partner Tom, loves it when I call him with the verdict on a repair. It goes like this: “This repair isn’t too bad. It’s a lot like the Droid Incredible. There’s just this one thing that’s tricky…”

You see, every phone seems to have some small thing that makes it hard to fix. Take the iPhone 3GS as an example. There’s a little connector (labeled #3) that’s a real pain the first time you try to fix the phone. If you’re not careful, you can snap the connector off the motherboard and then the phone won’t power up anymore.

Then there’s the iPhone 4 screen repair which requires 26 tiny screws be removed. If that wasn’t enough, most of them are different kinds of screws and you have to remember exactly where each of them goes. If you don’t have a system for this, you won’t remember.

One of the trickiest repairs we do is the HTC Evo. That glass touchscreen is actually taped directly to the LCD. Removing the touchscreen without breaking the LCD requires the use of a heat gun, a very small flathead screwdriver, and an extreme amount of care. If you don’t do it right, you’ll be shelling out another $70 for a new LCD.

I could go on and on with this list but you get the picture. Every phone has something that makes it hard to fix and, if you don’t do it right, you could end up leaving your phone in a much worse state. In addition, you’ll have to do the research on where to get the part, buy it, wait for it, and then spend a good part of an evening trying to figure out how to fix your phone.

Going with a reputable 3rd party repair shop, like Jet City Device Repair, might cost you a bit more cash up front, but in the end, you may very likely find it to be a much better value than trying to figure it out yourself.

The Bottom Line

If you have experience with small electronics or really enjoy tinkering with things, buy the parts for your broken cell phone online, get some tiny tools, watch a good video of the repair, and give it a shot. You can save a lot of money and you might have some fun in the process.

However, if you prefer to spend your evenings making dinner or hanging out with friends, give us a call. We’ll take care of it for you for a lot less money than a new phone and it will get done quickly and properly.

Regardless of your profession, you will discover family, friends, and random strangers calling you up to ask for help. If you’re a doctor, your great aunt will be calling to inquire about that weird rash she has. If you’re an investment planner, you’re cousin Joe will hit you up at the family reunion about the next hot stock to buy. You’re a mechanic? Some random guy at the next party you go to will undoubtedly have some “small issue” that he’s sure you can help him with. And God help you if you happen to work for Microsoft because your proud mother will have everyone of your 40 cousins calling when their computer inevitably crashes (I speak from experience on this one).

And if you fix cell phones for a living, you will frequently get asked: “What cell phone should I buy?”

Three years ago that was a very simple question to answer because there was one cell phone that stood head-and-shoulders above all the rest: The iPhone. But a lot has happened over the past few years and the market is now flooded with fantastic smartphones. The iPhone is of course still near the top of the list but so are all the Samsung Galaxy S phones, the MyTouch 4G, HTC G2, Droid Incredible, Droid X, Motorola Atrix, and a host of other phones. The list of highly capable iPhone competitors grows weekly and you really can’t go wrong with any of them.

So what is my answer to the question of what cell phone to buy? Don’t worry about the phone, figure out which carrier best suits your needs. Once you’ve found the carrier with the coverage and pricing you like, then take a look at their top-tier phones. You pretty much can’t go wrong at that point. The following is a short list of the phones I’d recommend right now.

• AT&T: iPhone 4, Samsung Captivate, or the Motorola Atrix.
• Verizon: iPhone 4, Motorola Droid X, HTC Droid Incredible
• T-Mobile: MyTouch 4G, Samsung Vibrant, HTC G2
• Sprint: HTC Evo, HTC Evo Shift, Samsung Epic 4G
• US Cellular: Samsung Mesmerize, HTC Desire
• Cricket: Sanyo Zio

Again, this list is for today. New phones are coming out constantly so a month from now the list of phones may change completely but I can guarantee you the phones will only get better, so the fundamental process of picking a phone will remain the same: Select a carrier, then pick a phone.