HTC Droid Incredible LCD Screen Repair

My HTC Droid Incredible, or as connoisseurs cal it, Dinc, was a piece of a phone dead as a door nail:

That is, a beautiful AMOLED LCD on this Dinc is cracked. Phone itself vibrated and lighted its buttons -- after I charged the battery. With $26.59 LCD screen replacement purchase 5 days later I'm ready to tackle the repair. There's plenty of more or less detailed instruction videos available, as Dinc was one of the most popular phone in its time. Watching these gives you some ideas.

Dincs use two types of LCD screens, mine was AMOLED, so the replacement screen above was matched. Note the magic blue sheen. Repair set from eBay included a torx screwdriver and a prying tool. And another torx driver, instead of claimed Phillips one. Oh well.

Next step was the most interesting one: pulling out the LCD screen's ribbon cable ended in me damaging it. Thank God it was a ribbon from the cracked screen.

Contrary to what videos tell you, the LCD panel can be replaced with couple ribbons sitting still in their connectors. But I pulled them all out anyway: a good picture of Dinc's internals is rare these days.

Assembly went without a hitch except for I didn't notice the tab on optical trackpad connector remained up (not flattened), like it was originally:

Pieces of yellow film should be put back, espevially one with a black gum strip.

 So, trackpad didn't work at the first attempt: tab was up. After the culprit was found and tab was flattened, everything started to work like a charm:

Extra $15 could buy me a new glass/digitizer, as my original Dinc shows some tiny dings. But for a $10 I spent originally on this dead phone it would be an overkill.

Next step: unlocking, rooting, flashing Jelly Bean. It's a pity there's no "official" Cyanogen Mod 10.1 project for HTC Droid Incredible and no 3.0.x kernel for it. The phone running stock Android  2.3.4 is relatively fast and smooth, and the reason going for Jelly Bean is adding better HWA in video decoding/rendering, better camera (8 MPix stock cam is probably the worst among other 8 megapixels), plus some of that JB "butter". Android 4.2.2 ROMs available are all work in progress in these respects. Or is there a good ROM?

Related articles

• Replacement Repair Parts for Droid Incredible Digitizer (Verizon Wireless)