[Desire HD General] spludgey:
I bought this phone on Ebay and instantly fell in love with it. It was pretty much perfect for me, I loved the big screen for my big sausage fingers, I loved how responsive it is, etc. The only thing I wasn't in love with was the battery life, but I got used to it too.

Like any responsible owner I ordered a screen protector and a flip case the day I bought the phone. Unfortunately they did not arrive as quickly as the phone did (within three days).

So I was at work one day and had put the phone into my top shirt pocket. As there was a big spider on one of our cameras, I decided to grab a stick and remove it. I found a nice stick that I liked and threw it up in the air while walking towards the camera whistling. It was a nice sunny day and I was in a good mood, what a perfect morning. Or so I thought.

I threw the stick a little too ambitiously into the air and couldn't quite manage to catch it. It dropped on the ground in front of me. Still in good spirits and still whistling, I bent down to pick it up.

*Flap!*

All of the sudden my good mood was gone and I'm pretty sure a dark cloud swiftly moved in front of the sun.

My new shiny Desire HD was lying on the ground. Face down.

I stood there for what may have been twenty seconds, but felt like an eternity, not sure whether I dared picking up the phone. Finally I summoned enough courage to do so. To my disappointment I had to realise my worst fear, the digitiser on the phone was smashed into a hundred pieces.:(

For the remainder of the work day I was in a very foul mood and really quite angry with the guiltless spider.

When I arrived home karma had played a cruel joke on me and had delivered the screen protector and flip cover in my absence.

I soon started researching how to replace the digitiser and finally found a disassembly guide on the internet. It seemed somewhat complicated and had a very annoying voice doing the narration, but I ignored these signs of impending doom and pushed on. Some of my conviction that I could do it stemmed from knowing that I was quite nimble (with the exception of stick throwing).

I ordered a digitiser off Ebay and checked my mailbox twice daily for the next two weeks or so. Finally it had arrived.

I had the majority of the tools ready thought I would need, the rest I would improvise. I did not have a metal strip as was mentioned that I would need, but I found an old floppy disk and cut up the metal cover which gave me something that looked remarkably similar to what was in the video.

It took a lot of effort and a lot of pausing, rewinding and replaying the youtube video but I finally got to the stage that I had removed all parts except for the LCD and the broken digitiser.

I put the metal strip into it as demonstrated in the video. The tactile response was poor and I hoped that I had cut what I needed to cut. I spent a good half hour doing this. Then, as I did not a have an oven that I could regulate perfectly, I decided that I would take two new condoms. I washed them and dried them to get rid of the lubricant and put the screen assembly first into one and then into the other. I started the kettle and made sure that my water had exactly 60 degrees. I then dropped the wrapped package into it and let it sit for 10 minutes. I took it out and tried to remove the digitiser to no avail. Back in it went at 65 degrees for 10 minutes. Still nothing.

Then I had the idea that it might be easier to take the digitiser out piece by piece. I took a very small screw driver and took out piece after piece. This must have taken me at least an hour, but I finally got the top layer of it out. When this was done, I had a little more space to play with and I decided that I would try to cut it out from the top. It was looking really quite good and the entire assembly started moving out, but on my final cut, I noticed that I had severed the LCD cable.

After this I continued to try and cut it out, but I realised that I hadn't been as close to getting it out as I had thought. I put it into the oven which was around 70 degrees, just as an experiment. I could still not get the glue to relinquish its hold of the LCD screen.

Grumpily, I took a larger screwdriver and levered the LCD screen out. It bent but didn't crack in the process. Maybe this is what I should have done in the first place? (Not that I would recommend it)

Back on Ebay I went and ordered a new LCD screen.

Today it finally arrived. I attached the new digitiser to the new LCD screen and then started the video yet again to see how to reassemble the phone. Unfortunately it was very hard to do this as the video was in the wrong order. I downloaded the video off youtube and reversed it. Interestingly the voice was much less annoying in reverse.

During the reassembly process I wanted to blow some lint off the screen that had landed on it, along with the lint I blew the box of screws off my desk. After a good ten minutes of searching I had found all but one of the screws. I figured that it had been swallowed forever by the carpet as even my rare earth magnets couldn’t find it, or the underpants gnomes had taken hold of it somehow.

If I had thought disassembling the phone was hard, I was in for a rude awakening. Reassembling it was extremely difficult. After using what felt like a good metre of sticky tape, I finally managed to get everything back together. I figured that the missing screw probably wasn’t doing anything important anyway.

The only problem that I appeared to have was that I hadn’t glued the digitiser back in place and it was constantly in danger of falling out of the phone. I decided that I would the phone into another case that I had bought while waiting for the first one. This was a silicon case and should force the digitiser to stay inside the phone.

First I wanted to test the phone however. I put in an old sim card, my memory card and started it up. My heart nearly skipped a beat when I saw “HTC” appear on the screen. Strangely it stayed there for some time. I sighed loudly and took the battery cover off.

Checking it, I couldn’t see anything that I had done wrong. So I put it all back together and turned it on again. Again the “HTC” appeared and after a while the booting logo followed. The phone simply took a while as it was a new sim card.

When android started up, I tested features and they all seemed to work except for the reception, I just couldn’t get any. I already saw me having to buy a new phone, but then realised that I was being an idiot and that I should put my current sim card into it.

After doing so, everything worked perfectly. I was very happy. Even my plan to keep the digitiser affixed to the phone with the cover worked well.

In Conclusion: It is possible to replace the digitiser (along with the LCD), but it is very difficult.