An old customer-friend who lives in the same area as me brought me his HD2 with a broken Digitizer. On the newer models of HTC it doesn't worth to change simply the digitizer. He bought a digitizer only from ebay. I'll give you some info on WHY HTC asks you a lot of money for a simple LCD or touch screen change.
Since the diamond era many of HTC's phones have the same construction like this. New phones are slimmer, way to slim, so they had to find a solution to fuse everything together. The LCD is factory glued to the digitizer and sometimes part of the chassis. The HD2 has allmost half of the phone fused together.
When i say fused i mean that parts are hold together by a thin double sided sticky foam, the glue holds very tight in place. If you take the individual components apart, you are not actually remove the glue, you just destroy the foam so it's impossible to glue the parts together again. The LCD is so slim now that breaks with a blink of an eye.
On the other side you have also contamination, unless you have a clean room, it's allmost impossible to glue the lcd and touchscreen together without having small dust particles or pieces of glue between them, even if you succeed (like i did half an hour a go) the end result will be messy.
I have good experience on repairing phones and PDA's (i was the owner of an official HTC service center some time a go) and even so it took me 2-3 hours to seperate the lcd, broken digitizer and chassis and glue them together again.
That time means money on big companies, they want to minimize that and also the rate of success, they simply change half of the phone and they are set. This also enables them to give you full warranty if the part is faulty etc.
LCD's and digitizers are glued together even on very old models (like P3300 etc) but at that time only the lcd assembly was changing.
On newer models you have a capacitive touch screen plus the whole face of the phone, plus buttons etc etc so the cost is higher.
Below there is a pic of the touch screen i removed:
Since the diamond era many of HTC's phones have the same construction like this. New phones are slimmer, way to slim, so they had to find a solution to fuse everything together. The LCD is factory glued to the digitizer and sometimes part of the chassis. The HD2 has allmost half of the phone fused together.
When i say fused i mean that parts are hold together by a thin double sided sticky foam, the glue holds very tight in place. If you take the individual components apart, you are not actually remove the glue, you just destroy the foam so it's impossible to glue the parts together again. The LCD is so slim now that breaks with a blink of an eye.
On the other side you have also contamination, unless you have a clean room, it's allmost impossible to glue the lcd and touchscreen together without having small dust particles or pieces of glue between them, even if you succeed (like i did half an hour a go) the end result will be messy.
I have good experience on repairing phones and PDA's (i was the owner of an official HTC service center some time a go) and even so it took me 2-3 hours to seperate the lcd, broken digitizer and chassis and glue them together again.
That time means money on big companies, they want to minimize that and also the rate of success, they simply change half of the phone and they are set. This also enables them to give you full warranty if the part is faulty etc.
LCD's and digitizers are glued together even on very old models (like P3300 etc) but at that time only the lcd assembly was changing.
On newer models you have a capacitive touch screen plus the whole face of the phone, plus buttons etc etc so the cost is higher.
Below there is a pic of the touch screen i removed:
If you want to replace a broken LCD or touch screen simply buy THE WHOLE LCD ASSEMBLY, it will save you time and possible frustration on the result. Most of the new models need the whole assembly.
