TCL 20 Pro is a beautiful device at an affordable price, this is a full review.
I like its curved screen, which is large and comfortable to hold by a single hand. Unfortunately I damaged the screen after dropping it on the ground.
Given its relatively small exposure in Australia, I didn’t expect much customer service but still gave it a try. The result wasn’t surprising: took me weeks to get a number of a third party repairer which wasn’t that responsive either.
I then decided to repair the screen myself, worst case I break the whole phone but it’s not going to cost me an arm and a leg.
There is no video on Youtube on how to fix the screen, the closest I could find was this one (the below screen shot was from it too as I forgot to take a phone of my own during repair).
At the end, it turned out replacing the screen is very easy, great thanks to TCL’s thoughtful modular design.
Below are the steps (you don’t need to follow all steps mentioned in the clip posted above because we just want to replace a screen):
- Open the back cover(heat gun needed).
- Disconnect the battery cable(highlighted on the phone below, 20 Pro has a different layout but is quite similar to the below) and take out the battery
- Disconnect the screen cable(on the left of the battery cable) and then remove the old cracked screen(heat gun needed)
- Install the new screen and reconnect the screen cable
- Put the battery back and connect the battery cable
- All done, you don’t need to remove any screws or module. (I went through a hard way by removing all screws but they are all of the same size so it’s not hard at all)
This device is definitely one of the easiest to fix. To give you a benchmark, Microsoft Surface Pro 2017 is on the bottom in terms of repairability as changing a battery will need you to remove the whole mother board first, with lots of screws in two different sizes!