Repair-It

This is really starting to irritate me. I was used to not taking that many photos with my 1520 due to the shaking OIS and the dying battery which meant unless the phone was nearly fully charged, it would probably die after a few pictures just from the extra drain to run the camera and processing. Which is probably the only reason I have tolerated it this long.

To recap, the glass has some kind of lint on the back side of it, which obscures both cameras. I do not think it had that much when I bought it. I think it increased from my pocket. Which means the seal there is probably not functioning which means this thing isn't really IP68 water resistant. So I probably have nothing really to lose here.

I will pull some posts from my Mint thread about repairing this. But basically I think the plan is something like this:
- Try to obtain the OEM glass with OEM adhesive. There are TONS of sources (eBay and Amazon) but it is very hard to know if I am getting OEM so this will take some research. I may not even succeed on this but I will try.

- Get appropriate tools. Those kits sometimes come with prying stuff or suction cup stuff. I think the plan is to get a small suction cup device. I do not want to remove the entire back, just the camera glass.

- Heat up camera glass/adhesive and try to lift an edge with the suction cup enough to pry it off gently. I don't care if it breaks I guess, but I don't want pieces falling into the cameras either.

In theory this isn't all that difficult, just sort of tedious and requiring care. Also as a refresher, recall that these phones have (had?) a reputation for shattering this glass for no apparent reason so as a result there are plenty of sources to buy the repair kits. Pretty good chance this phone had that, and the glass was replaced which is where the "seller refurbished" label came from.

My problem is likely due to carelessly replaced glass and probably imperfectly applied adhesive which let the dust in. I may want to get some canned air to carefully blow out the cameras.

Well that was easy.

I ordered this:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0789 ... UTF8&psc=1

Came with some tools.

All I did was take the end of one of them that is kind of like a scraper and try to wedge it into the edge of the glass to see if I could lift it or otherwise displace it. And pretty easily, I did.

Then I just took care to clean the actual cameras with a q-tip in glass cleaner, blow it out with some canned air, and clean the new glass before installing. Then I just removed the back and stuck it on.

Seems good now.
Regular camera Wide camera I will take some outside tomorrow where it was worst before. Hopefully the adhesive is halfway decent and it doesn't let pocket lint in this time though the replacement procedure is pretty easy. Unfortunately I think I need to treat the phone as not waterproof. But it probably wasn't waterproof before, either, since that was clearly not the OEM glass on there.

I would have preferred a design more like my Nokia Lumia 1520 where the camera had a large, round glass lens rather than a thin glass cover over the cameras.

Into the sun
Regular Wide Away from the sun
Regular Wide Now consider a picture I took last night of my generator fuel tank shut off valve before replacing the camera glass. This is just about worthless. Anyway glad this is fixed.

In direct sunlight I can still make out a few specs of lint. Not sure if that has entered or it is just that hard to keep clean. I didn't exactly do this repair in clean room conditions...and in fact my house was probably quite dusty at the time.

That said, I have been noticing the headphone jack clicks into place less positively and seems to pop out with more ease than there should be. I thought to myself...could there possibly be lint packed in there??

So I found an opened up paper clip, jammed it in the hole (you know, carefully) and stirred around trying to pull out any kind of lint ball from the bottom. And, in fact, I did. Damn. Plug goes in nicely again. Also I use it all the time, both in the car, and other places.

I had the headphone jack lint issue with one of my old iPhones. It doesn't seem to collect as much in the lightning connector.

The thing that floors me is I've only had this phone since Jan. I mean maybe it did have some lint from its prior life. But I cleaned my Lumia 1520 precisely ZERO times between 2015 and 2019. Same deal, no case, lived in pocket and was a used phone when I bought it. A buddy at work said to wash my pants with the pockets inside out. May try that...

I noticed that the mute switch on my iPhone 7 was becoming harder and harder to operate. While on a conference call today, I used a dental pick to clean out the lint from the edges of that switch. Works perfectly now. That was a satisfying fix.

It is difficult to think of a more appropriate conference call activity.

3 months later it had dust on the inside again. And vacation is coming up so...

Ordered another kit. Came with two lenses so this time I will not ruin the other one by soaking the adhesive in alcohol and windex by accident.

It was considerably harder to remove because I did a good job cleaning and pressing it on last time. Had to use a heat gun and infrared thermometer to heat it up to around 200F and then I was able to pry it off.

I still don't know where the dust is coming from but when I blew canned air into the camera area the back cover buldged out from the air pressure. So I am wondering if the rear cover was also off and also poorly reattached. A phone with water resistance surely shouldn't accumulate dust...likely it is not water resistant in its current state.

I've done a couple more lenses and I'm starting to shop around for like a V40 or something newer.

However, there may be one more thing I can do. Since my rear glass has been broken for a while, it occurred to me that I could replace the rear panel. But it turns out that you can buy a rear panel with the fingerprint sensor AND new camera glass all integrated and sealed. Just need a heat gun to set the glue after installing the new cover.

It is my hope that maybe this finally reseals the issue. And if not, replacing the glass will actually give my V30 some resale and I can sell it, recoup some money and buy whatever the next thing is. I think it is worth a try. Prices are cheap, too. The most expensive option I found was on Amazon for $26: https://www.amazon.com/Eaglewireless-Wa ... r=8-4&th=1

And there are cheaper options on eBay.