You know you have had one of those days when you drop your brand new Dell Venue Pro in the parking lot and the unit explodes. The cover comes off, the battery goes flying, and you express your frustration verbally. Then you pick up the pieces and look at the front glass and you do not see a single scratch on the beautiful Gorilla Glass. You smile and put everything back together and power on your phone, only to find that the LCD screen behind the Gorilla Glass is shattered, your head drops..oh and that verbal frustration returns.

Then you start your repair research process. You find a replacement LCD screen from a vendor in the UK called mobilephonecrazy.com. You buy the replacement part and wait for it to arrive.  While you wait you start looking for the instructions or videos that show you how to replace the LCD screen….nada, nothing. Not even any service manual documentation from Dell’s web site.

The part arrives and you call your buddy with the all the phone repair tools and you start to figure out how to disassemble the phone. Here is what the Dell Venue Pro looks like disassembled

Here is the breakdown of the pieces:

A – This is the rear of the glass and LCD once removed. You can see the ribbon cables that connect to the video card through the whole in piece B

B – This is the sliding mechanism and the mounting point for the front screen and the motherboard C

C – The motherboard. There are additional ribbon cable connectors.

D – This is the back of the phone. The silver part with the holes is the inner side of the battery compartment. The little piece to the right of D is the camera button that falls out when you take the phone apart.

E – These are the 6 torx screws that are in the back of the case

F -  These are the 4 torx screws that are removed to get the LCD and glass front disconnected from B

G – These are the 2 screw covers that are at the top of the back side of the slider piece

H – This is the back cover of the phone

I – These are the two tools you need. The Torx screwdriver and the pry tool

J – The phone battery

Disassembly process

Unfortunately I did not think ahead to bring a good camera or a camcorder to record the process, but here is what you have to do to disassemble the phone.

1) Take off the back battery cover

2) Remove 6 screws using torx screwdriver

3) Using a pry tool, work the back cover off. There are small tabs that keep the cover on. You must unseat the tabs all around the chrome back and black ends, there are also tabs on the inside of the battery cover box that you will need to pop out.. Note the camera button will fall out when you get it off. You may have to remove the black tape covering the SD card slot to loosen the inside tabs.

4) Motherboard is now exposed. There are 4 cables to remove. Use a pry tool to pop the connectors. Two have short cables that plug into the motherboard on one side. Two have longer cables that come from the LCD screen through the sliding mechanism. There is a small cable at the top that has a rubber grommet that goes over a post, you must loosen the grommet using a needle or other tool to get under the cable.

5) Once the motherboard is off, there are 4 screws to remove. If you open the sliding mechanism all the way you will find two screws through the metal sliding mechanism and then there are two other screws with round covers at the top back of the screen. Use a pin to pry off the covers, they are sticky.

6) Once the screws are loose, you can pry the glass cover piece off from the side and ends, more tabs. The cover is stuck on typically so you will need to work it loose.

7) Once open, there is another cable connector. There is a metal flap that you can flip up slightly and pry lose the connector. Once you have that lose, you can use the long cables to remove the LCD from the glass. Be sure not to touch the inside of the glass.

8) Replace the LCD and reverse the disassembly process. Do not forget to put the camera button back in before you put the back cover on. You will have to hold the phone vertically with the camera button down to keep it in place.

9) Make sure all the tabs are snapped back into place, especially on the ends of the phone.

It took us about 30 minutes to figure this out from scratch with no instructions. If I did it again, I probably could do it in 10 minutes.  The pry tool is very important. It needs to have a thin blade to get in the slider gap and pry off the cover at the chrome edges.

Hope this helps someone rescue their Dell Venue Pro from a bad fall.