Where to buy reputable cellphone replacement parts?
May 3, 2015 1:05 PM Subscribe
I broke the screen on my cellphone (nexus 5/ LG D820) and need to purchase a replacement screen for it. Reviews on most sites that sell replacement cellphone parts complain about non-oem/shoddy/fake replacement parts.
Are there any good sites to order high quality cellphone parts from?
Often iFixit may give you leads on the popular parts.
I'd say buy from reputable vendor or at least vendors that sells through reputable middleman, like eBay or Amazon, that has a return policy.
posted by kschang at 3:29 PM on May 3, 2015
I'd say buy from reputable vendor or at least vendors that sells through reputable middleman, like eBay or Amazon, that has a return policy.
posted by kschang at 3:29 PM on May 3, 2015
Did you purchase the phone from google? Even if you didn't, i'd contact them because they've been known to give out free replacements fairly readily.
Fake parts are generally only around for iphones and popular samsung models. No one would bother with the nexus 5, it's a relatively low production niche device.
That said, if i was going to buy one, i'd buy one from an ebay power seller that lists having sold a bajillion. This one with over 800 sold is a good bet. I've never gotten a junk screen from a seller like that, and the one time i did it was simply defective and they quickly sent me a new one(like, 2 days later i had a functional screen).
This same advice applies to those often faked models as well. The reality is, for a lot of phones, there is no such thing as an OEM screen. If there are, they're held back by the manufacturer for official warranty service. There's high quality assemblages of compatible or B grade displays and official or highly similar glass panels... but there's generally not "real" OEM displays in any meaningful way unless they're "refurbs", where the broken glass was removed from a still functional display or displays rejected from QA. Think about it. Why would a big OEM order significantly more displays than devices they intended to manufacture? They'd do the math and order enough to cover typical warranty repairs. Anything else would be wasting money either on the part of the manufacturer of that component or module(which would be a department of LG in this case), or of the device OEM.
Which is to say, the best quality ones are either reconditioned used ones that are previously broken, or ones with a couple stuck pixels. I just got a high quality display from an ebay power seller to repair my moms iphone, and it showed up with a couple stuck pixels. I consider this relatively normal.
If you don't get a perfect display, that doesn't mean it's a fake.
posted by emptythought at 7:04 PM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]
Fake parts are generally only around for iphones and popular samsung models. No one would bother with the nexus 5, it's a relatively low production niche device.
That said, if i was going to buy one, i'd buy one from an ebay power seller that lists having sold a bajillion. This one with over 800 sold is a good bet. I've never gotten a junk screen from a seller like that, and the one time i did it was simply defective and they quickly sent me a new one(like, 2 days later i had a functional screen).
This same advice applies to those often faked models as well. The reality is, for a lot of phones, there is no such thing as an OEM screen. If there are, they're held back by the manufacturer for official warranty service. There's high quality assemblages of compatible or B grade displays and official or highly similar glass panels... but there's generally not "real" OEM displays in any meaningful way unless they're "refurbs", where the broken glass was removed from a still functional display or displays rejected from QA. Think about it. Why would a big OEM order significantly more displays than devices they intended to manufacture? They'd do the math and order enough to cover typical warranty repairs. Anything else would be wasting money either on the part of the manufacturer of that component or module(which would be a department of LG in this case), or of the device OEM.
Which is to say, the best quality ones are either reconditioned used ones that are previously broken, or ones with a couple stuck pixels. I just got a high quality display from an ebay power seller to repair my moms iphone, and it showed up with a couple stuck pixels. I consider this relatively normal.
If you don't get a perfect display, that doesn't mean it's a fake.
posted by emptythought at 7:04 PM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by AppleTurnover at 1:13 PM on May 3, 2015