Vacation Good, Technology Bad

So, we’re on day four of seven in the Caribbean, and so far it’s been a lot of fun. Other than one cloudy day, the rest of the vacation so far has been hot and sunny, which is great. As it’s still low season, the resort isn’t as packed as we’re used to, which is fine because we’ve been required to spend a lot of time doing work due to some projects we have going on back home.

Unfortunately for me, I dropped my iPhone 4 yesterday and ended up cracking the front-side protective glass. In the iPhone 3G, it would cost about $15 and some sweat and tears to replace the glass. Apparently with the iPhone 4 though it’s not possible to replace the glass by itself, since it’s firmly glued to the LCD. So, you generally have to replace the LCD unit at the same time.

I’m going to hit the Apple store in Vancouver on Saturday and see how much it will be to replace it. My options at this point are:

• Pay Apple to repair the phone. Probably between $200 and $400 I’m guessing.
• Buy a brand new phone and sell the old cracked one on eBay. As many companies are fixing the glass for $150 or so, I imagine someone will probably buy it for around $500 – $600, meaning I get a new phone for $200 – $300 after the difference.
• Buy the part myself (around $150) and fix it sometime next week

My preference is to have Apple fix it, since then I’ll at least have my original warranty in place. But if it’s too much money, I may just get a new phone and eBay the old one, or grab the part and try to fix it myself. My only real concern with the part route is that it may not be an OEM part (even though it is advertised as such), and I don’t really want to sell a phone with non-original parts in it someday.

But I’ll sort it out when I get back into town. Surprisingly the phone works completely fine despite having a smashed screen.