VX8300 LCScreen Replacement - tips (sic) on soldering speaker leads to circuit board?

[trippknightly]

I have a VX8300 w/a badly cracked primary screen. Have bought a replacement LCD and only now realize that there are 4 lead wires soldered to it connected to 2 speakers (or 1 is a vibration device) in the earpiece. Getting the rest of the screen ready to go is easy enough (care around disconnecting ribbon cables, getting the clamshell apart), but would like advice on what kind of soldering iron I should use or any other advice to reattach these small wires.

I have experience doing some soldering on larger boards, though probably will watch some YouTube videos on the subject.

I'm mostly doing this as a challenge and the only way to fix things yourself is to start trying. If the phone gets ruined so be it as it's not useable long-haul anyway w/ the screen as it is plus someday soon I might switch to a smarter phone. But might as well maximize my odds on the repair. Thx

[CrazyMind2017]

I can't give you any advice on soldering the wires, but I can tell you that I recently took apart a couple VX8300 phones for the first time. I was able to change out everything on the bottom of the case (motherboard, side buttons, external speakers, microSD door, etc.) except for the ribbon. I was afraid to mess with the part of it that connects to the screen on the top half of the case. How do you get the ribbon out to replace it?

My history with this phone is that I bought a truly new one of great quality on ebay about 18 months ago, and I immediately fell in love with it. About a month or two ago, it started randomly shutting off for no reason, typically when being flipped shut. I didn't know why at the time, but now that I've had the experience of taking these suckers apart, I'm reasonably sure the problem was a bad ribbon.

Anyway, I bought a couple supposedly new replacement phones on ebay last month from two different sellers. They were both around $35 and neither had the LG logo on the front. Also, the area under the battery had brighter, shiny tape compared to my original phone, and the microSD door was not glossy and didn't quite fit snugly with a microSD card installed. The external speakers sounded good, but not great like the speakers on my original phone. Worst of all, the signal sensitivity on both replacement phones was absolutely horrible compared to my original phone, which consistently gets 4 bars all throughout my house, even in the basement. The two replacement phones would usually get 2-3 bars upstairs, but 0-1 in the basement, and call quality down there was piss poor. I called one of them from a cordless I have installed on my landline, and it wouldn't even ring. I did several searches to find out why identical phones with identical firmware would differ so greatly in signal strength, and all I could find were a few comments about inconsistencies in the production line and poor quality control.

So I sent one of those suckers back, since they're most likely either factory refurbs or overstock that failed quality control back in 2006-07, but then later found their way out into the world. The other one, I took apart just to see what I could find. I was able to transfer my original motherboard and external speakers into the case of the refurb that I took apart, and now it works great. I found it interesting that the signal strength, at least in this case, is completely a function of the motherboard. My old motherboard is using the new antenna, and it still gets a great signal. The new motherboard is in my old case with the bad ribbon and old antenna, and it still has a terrible signal.

I also bought an additional phone from a third seller for around $55 that I believe is actually new in all likelihood. This one was made in Korea, not in China like the others. The microSD cover is glossy and fits properly like on my original phone, there's an LG logo on the front, and the area under the battery matched my original phone. However, the external speakers matched the ones on the crappy refurb phones, not the great speakers on my original. And the signal quality is somewhere in the middle. It's not as good as my original phone, but it's not nearly as bad as the two refurbs, and I don't have any trouble with call quality in my basement.

So if you're willing to spend a little extra money, I'd recommend buying one of the refurbs for like $30-35 and just transferring your motherboard, speakers, and microSD door into it. Then you should have a perfect phone that works like new without having to solder anything.

You wouldn't happen to have any idea how to get the phone to think those old Get It Now apps have been registered on the network so I don't have to look at that stupid white screen every time the phone powers up? I figured out that with data blocked, the only way to exit the white screen is to either hit the end key or to flip the phone shut when the main screen is white. With data unblocked, the phone will connect to the network and exchange some information with the tower, and then the white screen disappears on its own after a few seconds. But I'd still rather not have the white screen at all if possible. The $55 phone from Korea doesn't have this Registering Applications message. I wonder if I could pull files from it using BitPim and then save them to the other phone to eliminate the problem.