Did you ever take a closer look at the iPhone 4 design. It’s new sleek and modern look catches the eye upon removal from it’s packaging. However, what is very deceiving to the eye is the change to an 80% surface area of glass. Upon further questioning, I began to think that this design was clearly business driven. It’s genius, the phone is now 80% glass, making it a 4/5 chance that when you drop the iPhone 4 you will either break the screen or back cover. Fortunately, Apple was consumer friendly in making the back cover an easy fix.

The back cover has historically been the hardest component of the phone to repair (as everything was previously attached to it in the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS models). The iPhone 4 allows for a much easier repair option for the back cover. The iPhone 4 has two screws at the base of the phone which come out very simply with a small phillips head screwdriver. Upon removal, the iPhone 4 back cover simply slides up and comes off.

To repair this you can either save the plastic surround and buy a new piece of glass, or you can do my recommendation, which is to just buy the entire assembly ready to go. I think we are talking about $10 more here which will keep the phone looking clean and original. Once you purchase this new assembly, you simply slide it back on, install the two screws and you are ready to go.

The downside of this easy back panel fix is that the screen is now much much much harder to repair. It now requires complete removal of nearly all of the phone’s components.