Seven floors down: the smartphone that refused to die

One clumsy moment on a rainy London morning sent a phone tumbling off a seventh-floor balcony. What happened next surprised everyone involved.

Smartphone with a shattered screen on a wooden kitchen table — Back in the flat: the phone on the kitchen table after its fall.

A split second of bad luck

It was an ordinary weekday in Islington. Reaching to close the window, the owner knocked her phone off the ledge of her seventh-floor flat. Down on the pavement she found splintered glass, a twisted frame and a completely black display. On it: years of photos, her contacts, her banking app and work files, none of them backed up.

A brand-new handset would have cost her around £1,000, and her memories would have been gone for good.

Straight to the repair bench

Phone repair workshop with a London street and red bus outside — A workshop that specialises in smartphone repairs.

That same afternoon the phone landed on a technician's bench. The verdict: glass and housing needed replacing and the battery had swollen, but the logic board was untouched. Every bit of data had survived the impact.

Technician using precision tweezers inside an opened smartphone — Careful work under the magnifier lamp.

Step by step, the technician fitted a complete new screen assembly, straightened the frame, tested the camera, speaker and Face ID, and then installed a fresh battery.

Fitting a new battery into a smartphone — A swollen battery can be a fire risk, so it was swapped straight away.

Good as new

Repaired smartphone with a flawless screen held at a London café — Under two hours later: new screen, new battery, no data lost.

Roughly two hours later the phone was working perfectly, for a fraction of the price of a new model, and not a single photo was missing.

Dropped your phone? 3 things to do

Don't plug it in if the frame is bent: the battery may be damaged.
Cover cracked glass with clear tape so you don't cut your fingers.
Get it to a workshop quickly to assess the damage and save your data.

Cracked screen? Get it checked today.

Repair with The Device Hub