The camera on my phone broke. The autofocus wouldn’t engage – it’s a known issue. I bought a repair kit from AliExpress for 15chf. The phone is out of warranty, so I figured I could take a punt at self-repair and if all else failed, I’d buy a new phone. Otherwise, I could do a factory reset, ship the phone to the UK, pay parts and labour, and wait for god knows how long before I’d get it back.
There are plenty of tutorials on YouTube that make the process look oh-so-simple. They lie. It took 25 minutes just to remove the two €¥©§#¡!!? torx screws that close the case. From there it didn’t get better. Cracking the case open went OK until I forgot to take the SIM card holder out and bent it. Then trying to get the motherboard off was a right mess. Bits actually went sproing! and I bent the motherboard when I didn’t remove a screw not mentioned in the video. I bent the motherboard. At this point, I figured my phone was well and truly borked but I reassembled it (and straightened it) as best I could. I didn’t expect it to boot. It did. WiFi, antenna, BT, all work (so far). Camera works. I… am kinda in shock actually. I just keep thinking the thing’ll HCF at some point, but for now, kudos to Oneplus.
