Replacing the Glass on a Samsung Galaxy S iii

I recently had the misfortune of shattering the glass on my phone's screen. I went to put it in my pocket, I felt one corner of the phone go in, but apparently that wasn't enough because my phone fell out of my pocket instead of in. There's this funny thing about gorilla glass. Apparently, if you strike it just right at one of its weak spots, the corners, it's enough to shatter [hopes and dreams] it into many, many pieces. Thankfully though, someone produces a replacement piece of gorilla glass to replace and hopefully restore said broken dreams...er...glass.

Finding the Parts
Really all you need for this is a blow drier or heat gun, a sharp and/or thin knife, a credit card or a guitar pick which you don't care about, and the replacement glass. If you have a infrared thermometer, you might want to use that to gauge the temperature as you go, but I doubt it's necessary. If you do have one though, I heated my phone's screen to about 200&deg; F.

So with that, I went on the interwebs to find a replacement screen, which to my surprise, costs about $260 on Amazon. As it turns out, screens for the Galaxy S iii are incredibly costly because with this phone, screen means glass AND digitizer since they are glued together. What I needed was just the glass. I searched Amazon some more and stumbled upon this one. When I bought that one week ago, it cost exactly $23.01. Today, just over a week later, it costs $34.99. It looks like this guy might be drop shipping because the price for the screen on Ebay also went up in the last week from about $20 to $28.99 WITH the tools. Either way though, buying just the glass is still a $200 cheaper than buying the entire digitizer and glass assembly.

Now, I'd like to note before going on that, yes, it is cheaper to replace just the glass on your phone, but it's also more dangerous. You could scratch up your digitizer pretty bad or shatter it in the process of getting the glued glass off. The way I look at it though, why not try because if you fail you'll have spent $260 + $30, but if you succeed you will have saved yourself over $200.

Some Precautions
Before you start, pull off your back cover and remove your battery, sim card (if you have a gsm phone), and micro sd card.

The Instructions
Now with that, the Youtube video I watched to give me an idea of what to expect can be found here.

Some Tips
I used a blow drier to heat my phone up. I found that the glue was workable at about 180&deg;F. I never got my phone above about 205&deg;F.

Start at the top of the phone if possible. The bottom has some wires that attach under the glass to the back and menu buttons and you don't want to break those.

Once you get the glass up, use the credit card, guitar pick, or other flat soft plastic object to keep the glass up and work the glue out.

I was surprised to find that the digitizer is actually a pretty durable layer. There were a few things I did that I thought for sure were going to shatter it, but it was completely fine. I ended up with only one real nick (thankfully).

Finally, it took me about two hours and thirty minutes to complete because my glass was so shattered.