Today we are going to tear down the BlackBerry Priv. The actual build of this phone is pretty
complex, but the two most important repairs a battery swap and a screen replacement are
surprisingly easy, and I’ll show you what I mean throughout the video.
First thing remove the sim card tray and the SD card tray and they are both along the top.
Once those are out you can peel back the back cover from the phone. Make sure to watch out
for the power button and volume button so it’ll just unsnap from the frame. Then you
can slide the phone out from the back cover. Pretty simple. Here you can see the rear 18
megapixel camera, and then a couple of the antennas that are along the back of the phone
with the NFC pad and the Qi charging pad. All of these have little contact points that
just rest on the mother board. Here is a close up shot of the contact points on the mother
board, and the contact points on the pads. Remove this plastic shield. For the next step
you’ll need a screwdriver this one is a T5 screw its holding the battery in place.
You can just unplug the battery. It’s just like a little Lego piece that snaps into the
main board. Pretty straight forward. To remove the battery it does help out a lot if the
battery is a little bit heated up, but it will soften the adhesive behind the battery.
You can use the little pull tab to pull it up. You really do not want to pry this battery
out at all, and I’ll show you why in just a second. Here behind the battery you can
see that there are some small ribbon cables that are very easy to rip. They’re for the
power button. Here’s the battery its self it is a 3400 milliamp battery. There are two
screws down here for the loud speaker. There’s a little housing with some funky white glue
surrounding it. You can remove the freaky white glue. And then the loud speaker will
just pop out of the housing itself. Pretty cool. Pretty easy to replace. I will link
all the replacement parts down in the video description. There is a little protective
cover over the headphone jack as well. There are 8 screws on the main board. Once all those
8 screws are removed (they are all the T5s as well) you can take off all these little
connectors, they are for the screen. They just pop off like little Legos. This one down
here is for the keyboard. You can pop that off as well. Then the main board can be removed
from the frame of the device. There’s one more cable on the bottom for the power button,
and you can just unclip that as well. Here you can see the thermal paste for the Qualcomm
808 processor it will help dissipate the heat from the processor onto the main frame of
the phone. Here’s the camera, the rear 18 Megapixel camera. So you can see here the
screen and the slider mechanism the head phone jack just falls out from the frame. You can
see that it has a bunch of little connection pads that rest up against the mother board,
and that’s how it receives its signal. The rest of these screws are a bit smaller I’m
going to use my T4 driver. There’s 8 of them that hold the key board part of the frame
onto the screen part of the frame. So we are going to remove that from the sliding mechanism.
Just make sure that the screen ribbon cables slide through the little slot in the key board
frame. So let’s take a look at the keyboard. The keyboard is stuck to the frame relatively
permanently. If you remove the keyboard you will have to find some way to adhere it. I
do have to fix my keypad though because of my durability video I did mess up the keypad
a little bit. So we are going to tuck that back in. Looks like the keyboard can be replaced
it just depends on how they sell their replacement parts. If it comes with the copper piece you
can remove that from the frame. If the keyboard comes without the copper piece, make sure
you leave the copper backing installed on the frame if you just remove the keyboard
section. I’m going to put my keyboard back on I will have to use some kind of super glue
or something else to adhere it, because there is no residual adhesive on the back of the
plastic. So here is the sliding mechanism. It’s a bunch of these little wire springs
that you can detach from the front frame. If you are going to remove this section you
want to lift it up over the little gold little do-hikie fold up the ribbon cables and tuck
it down into the screen. This is a fairly difficult process so I would recommend not
touching this sliding mechanism unless you have to. It is not essential to repairing
the screen, and I will show you that I just a second. I did end up bending this part of
the frame just a little bit to slide it out from the little grooves. This next part is
not essential to a screen replacement either it is only important if your trying to get
into the front camera. There is a little metal bracket and one more screw as well. And you
can just remove the front 2 Megapixel camera from its little holster. It’s a tiny little
guy, not super important. Now here’s the screen, and let me show you how easy this
is, and its way easier than the galaxy screens, where there is a bunch of adhesive on the
LCD and the glass and you gotta make sure not to break anything. There is only adhesive
surrounding the edge of the BlackBerry Priv which is very nice. I found it easiest to
go in from where the ear piece is, because there’s not a whole lot of glue and there’s
a little slot in between the frame and the glass. So once I lifted that up I could slide
a business card in between the glass and the frame. That QR code just takes you to my YouTube
channel speaking of which if you have enjoyed this video so far make sure you hit that subscribe
button. It does help me keep making videos like this into the future. Now that I’ve
heated up the phone my business card will slip in. Make sure you don’t put it in too
far into the top of the phone, and I will show you why in just a second. Once you pop
out from the side you can just take it and slide it all the way down as long as the phone
is still warm from the heat gun. I usually get it to about just where it’s too hot
to touch and the card will just slice through the adhesive all the way down to the bottom
of the phone and you can just slice though the bottom of the phone as well. It’s super
simple. I imagine that a professional technician could replace this screen in about 5 or 10
minutes once they are used to the operation. It’s a pretty impressive design. There’s
one ribbon cable underneath holding the LCD onto that screen extension cable that we were
talking about before. Now that I’ve unplugged that we can see the part that I was warning
you about. Now if you screen is shattered or broken you don’t need to worry about
damaging it anymore. Since my screen is working I want to keep it functional. Now about this
point during my teardown this is where I realize that the screen can be removed without actually
opening up the phone. You can see that you new replacement screen can just be plugged
into the body while everything is still intact, which is fantastic! Now I’m going back into
the track mechanism. When I put the phone back together just to prove that the screen
can be replaced without the phone being taken apart. Now the track mechanism is put back
together I’m going to put in the front facing camera, put the back fragile plastic pieces
back into place. Now if you did take apart your sliding mechanism, make sure you line
up the flex ribbing cable with the little holes in the frame so that the ribbon won’t
be pinched when you’re sliding the phone up and down. Then you can take the screen
extension cable and slide it though the keyboard section of the frame. It will end up near
the top of the little slot. There are 8 screws and you can take your 18 Megapixel rear camera
and plug it back into the main board. Plug your power button back into the bottom of
the main board. Fold that over and put it back onto the frame. There are 8 screws holding
the mother board onto the frame of the phone. Plug in all of your ribbon cables like the
keyboard and your two screen extensions. Put in your loud speaker and protective black
housing, and the housing for the headphone jack. Put those 3 screws back into place.
Now that the phone is completely assembled lets install the screen. It just plugs into
the main body of the phone just like a little Lego piece and all of the other connections
that we have been working with. Most of the replacement screens come with adhesive preinstalled
so just remove the protective covering over the adhesive and then set the screen down
into place and you’re done! I’m going to plug in the battery and make sure the phone
works by pressing the power button, and everything is great. It’s a pretty fantastic design.
I’m impressed that the screen can be replaced so easily. Screw the battery back in, and
you can tuck it back into the back housing. Staring with the bottom and just moving your
way up the sides clipping it down into place put the sim card and the SD card trays back
in and everything is good. If you have any questions make sure to leave them down in
the comments below. Feel free to like if this video helped you, and subscribe. Does
help me out a lot! Thanks for watching!