Replacing your iPhone 3Gs Battery - Easy to Start... Painful to Finish

My daughter's iPhone has been dying for the last few weeks, and between my IP Phone experiment and the fact that hooking it up to an external battery has been "good enough", I have been putting off doing anything about it. However, I haven't been able to convince her that she really wants to switch to Android, and it turns out that while the rest of the family can drop AT&T either in June or July, her line isn't off contract until November. So I decided to look at "options".

One of the first items I found was the following video from DirectFix:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIEdIxRpU3g

Watching this three minute video convinced me this was going to be a piece of cake! Heck, Apple even labelled the connections by number in the order to remove them. It's like they were begging me to do this!

So I went to the site, ordered the battery, screen tool, screen suction tool, and mini Phillips screw driver. With shipping it wasn't quite $30 - less than any phone we were going to get unlocked, and it wasn't adding another two years.

Got the parts earlier today, and started to work while watching the video. This time through, I noticed a few places where they talked about doing something, but didn't really show what they were doing. This was a bit of a problem with the screen tool as the ends quickly leveraged themselves into plastic junk. A mini standard screwdriver worked much better to pry things loose, and then the suction cup did the rest of the work. Then later they mentioned a couple things about how the motherboard was under a couple of lips, but I had no trouble getting it out, so that obvious wasn't a big deal.

Got everything out in around 10 minutes, put the new battery in, and now it was time to see how to put it back together.

Hmmm... say, this video stops right after you get the old battery out. Isn't there one that shows you how to put it back together? Well yes, there are some. The best of these is:
http://youtu.be/oEmlPK9R6Og

However, even here they tend to "fast forward" through the tricky parts because you obviously figured it out well enough to take it apart, right?

Not so much as it turns out. I had everything connected, and was only missing one screw, when I went to snap everything back together... and the top half was a real struggle. Then when I went to put the SIM tray back in... it wouldn't. Open everything back up, walk through things again, realize that there was something in the corner where the camera was that just wasn't right. Fiddle with the fit and a metal clip here for half an hour, and finally get everything to feel like it was seated properly. Then get the cables back on, and the glass fit much smoother this time, look over at my workspace, and notice that I was so excited that I had left out four of the screws.

Not willing to tempt fate, I put those in a small bag, and finished screwing the phone back together. Sure enough, it came back to life, remembered all her contacts, and is chugging away happily. Except for one little thing. It seems that now the camera won't work...

Assuming I put something in the wrong place or missed a connection, I'm going to consider this a success since the phone is doing everything else just fine, and I did save a good bit over sending the phone out for a repair, or replacing it. On the other hand, I can't say that I plan to do this again any time soon :-)