fun and games for tiny fingers

Despite involving detaching some tiny plugs which were too small for pliers (couldn't find my tweezers) and which therefore had to be rolled out of their tiny sockets by placing a small Torx driver at either side and rotating them the lengthy process of removing most of the removable bits from Nicky's phone in order to get at the screen went reasonably well, up to a point.

When teeny wires had to start being de-looped from around teeny bits of plastic the whole putting-it-back-together thing started to seem a little bit of a worry, particularly given the amount of removal of small pieces of sticky rubber padding, each a different size, which would have to all be replaced in the same spot to prevent teeny plugs being shaken free of teeny sockets in the unlikely event of successful reconstruction. Given the limited time available it took me another evening just to unstick the motherboard from the display housing, another evening to pry the cracked screen away from the display then two more evenings to attempt to expose the tape holding the touchscreen cable and socket by separating the thin sheet of metal behind the screen from the screen housing, which lifted easily away from the housing in all the demonstration videos in the same movement which removed the screen and the display but which seemed hemmed-in by the extremely fragile plastic housing on this particular handset and which was still not allowing itself to be removed even after several glue-removing heatings and scrapings and not even after sacrificing part of the housing (a little extra double-sided tape and superglue would surely be an acceptable compromise if the main screen-replacing part of the repair could be effected) at which point I started looking at plan B (getting a second-hand replacement similarly-aged-and-specced model from somewhere) which quickly mutated into plan C, which was practically the most simple (involving nowt more than upgrading) but which still required a couple of evening's work to rattle through some reviews and specs and so on in order to not end up with the wrong handset.

Replacing the display in the N95 was so much simpler.