You accidentally dropped your mobile phone from a high distance and now the screen is completely cracked. The phone still works fine, but you have those deep gashes or scratches that make the image a little difficult to see. What do you do?
Don’t throw away a perfectly working phone that you paid good money for just because the screen has cracks in it. There are several creative ways to deal with your broken mobile phone screen.
Fix The Screen Yourself
This isn’t a very creative solution but it is much more fun, and cost-effective, than having someone else fix the screen. If you send the phone to the company, you often pay a huge fee for the work when it is something you can do yourself. Sure, you could find a cheaper repair man, but by doing the fix yourself you learn about how your phone fits together, you save money, and you just might have some fun with it.
As long as you follow directions exactly, you shouldn’t have any trouble fixing the broken screen. You do need some specific tools, including tiny screwdrivers, which will add to the cost of the repair if you don’t have them already.
Each phone is different but the basic steps include:
- Remove the back of the phone
- Remove the battery
- Remove tiny screws from motherboard
- Remove motherboard
- Separate the screen and the glass
- Put it all back together again with the new screen or glass
The best website to help you fix your screen, complete with step-by-step tutorials for hundreds of phones is iFixit.
Make Kintsugi Art
Kintsugi is a Japanese art form that turns broken pottery into works of art. The artist breaks pottery and then puts it back together again using gold to fill in the cracks. The result is beautiful lines of gold. The idea is that something broken is still beautiful.
You can use this same technique and idea with your broken phone. Instead of using gold, you just need to use some Sharpies or other permanent marker. This one works best on the back of your phone if it is broken there. You can do this on the front, too, but some colors might cover the screen too darkly so you can’t see. To avoid that, just use light colors.
How do you create Kintsugi Sharpie art on your broken phone screen?
- Choose your marker colors. Light works best for front screens.
- Color the cracks in the screen. Use different colors to create a rainbow effect. It is fine to color over the crack and onto the screen a little, but you mostly want to keep the color in the crack.
- Wipe away any extra marker ink you got on the screen. The ink that seeped inside the crack will remain and the rest will wipe away back to a clean screen.
Prevent the Cracks from Spreading with Nail Polish
This broken screen idea is similar to the Sharpie one, but it serves a different purpose and has slightly different steps. You can use nail polish to “glue” the cracks together to prevent them from breaking any more than they already are. Sure, you could use super glue, but nail polish is more fun because of the different colors.
Just like with Sharpies, choose a lighter color nail polish so you don’t completely cover the screen with color.
- Paint a good amount of nail polish over the crack on your screen. You want there to be enough nail polish to seep into the cracks.
- Immediately wipe away the nail polish from the screen. You don’t want to wait like you can with the Sharpies. If you wait too long, the nail polish will dry and it won’t wipe away so easily.
- Let the nail polish that seeped into the cracks dry for at least 10 minutes before using the phone again.
Embrace the Broken Screen With Fun Wallpapers
As long as the phone still works and you can see the screen well enough, why even bother fixing it? Instead, embrace the cracks and have fun with the wallpaper. You can find many wallpapers that show something punching, kicking, or crashing into something else. When you place it on your phone it appears like the figure is breaking the glass.
No matter what you love, such as anime, Disney, sports, movies, or music, you can find cracked screen wallpapers that fit your personality. No matter where the crack is on the phone, you will find a wallpaper that has the character smashing the screen in just the right place. People will look at your wallpaper and think the cracks are part of the picture and not the actual phone.
Practice Jailbreaking or Rooting Your Phone
Jailbreaking and rooting your phone is when you give yourself administrator privileges on your phone. That means you can change settings that you weren’t allowed to before. Those changed settings will allow you to use apps that require administrator privileges.
There are two major problems with jailbreaks and rooting. One is that once you do that to your phone you have broken the warranty and can no longer get help from the company if you need it. The second is that there is a risk of totally messing up the phone if you do the steps wrong.
Neither of these is a problem with a phone that has a broken screen. A broken screen breaks warranty anyway and if you do mess up the steps it won’t matter too much because you already broke the phone screen.
This is your chance to practice jailbreak and rooting without fear. Go for it and see if you like your new phone with administrator privileges. If so, you’ll feel safer doing it on a new phone.
These creative ways to deal with a broken mobile phone screen let you continue to use your phone even with the break. As Kintsugi artists believe, that broken screen is still beautiful. You save money with these fun ways to fix your screen, too. Save money, make art, have fun.
