HELP - iPhone4 screen scrambled after bootup.

[Mr Matt]

Hi

I have an iPhone4, bought in UK but now I am in Thailand so no iStore here to repair it if needed. No local phone repair shops want to touch it.

Right now, the phone will boot normally, it can go into recovery mode and into DFU. iTunes sees the phone as normal and can sync/copy/read/restore.

A few weeks ago the phone started to drop calls frequently and have no signal is areas where I used to get signal before, this may not be a symptom of the issue I now have however and could be Thailand's poor coverage. Then small parts of the screen started to flash and be scrambled for a fraction of a second, then the phone started to stutter as I scrolled across the home screens. Both of these faults gradually worsened over a couple of weeks until more parts of the screens were glitching and the stutter was longer and more frequent. This was on FW 4.5 (I think).

I upgraded the firmware to 5.1 and the issues became much more severe. The problem I now have is that the phone's screen scrambles right after the Apple logo and the phone is about to launch into the homescreen, you can kinda see pieces of the home screen but it is like little sqaures of the screen are repeated and scattered or there is just a mess of pixels covering various parts of the screen, The phone kinda operates as normal i.e. if you press Home you can see some of the slider and after a few attempts I can get it to accept the slide motion to unlock to the home screen, but it is too badly scrambled to see what is going on.

I've done several restores using backups or as a new device but it is always the same result now.

What's interesting is that the Apple logo and the restore screens show normally, i,e. the phone screens look normal during the restore - no scrambling at all, the scrambling only starts after the Apple logo and the phone has booted into Home. Also, if I do a hard reset then the icon showing the phone shutting down is displayed normally too. If it wasn't for the bootup displaying normally I would say that this was a hardware problem with the screen or connector, but because some screens show normally it feels like a software or memory problem .

I cannot find anyone else with this same problem on the net which is why I joined here!

Any advice would be appreciated.

TIA.

 

[Jeremy]

If after some fresh restores you are still having the same issue, you have a major hardware issue that probably can not be fixed.

 

[Mr Matt]

If after some fresh restores you are still having the same issue, you have a major hardware issue that probably can not be fixed.

That's it?

It's a ?600 paperweight??

 

[Mr Matt]

Come on guys, I was directed here because I was told you were all devs and iGurus and iGeniuses, can I get at least a technical guess of why this phone is behaving this way?

How can the boot, shutdown and restore screens all display properly but the iOS screens be scrambled? Is the boot screen in a different mode or resolution to the iOS screens? If so then I can see how this can be a screen, connector or screen driver problem. I don't know the workings of an iPhone, how does it use graphics memory and could this be the problem?

Any advice rather than "just throw it away" would be much appreciated.

 

[joe_fresh]

Call apple directly. you may have to send it to them and if it is out of warranty you might have to pay for it to be repaired.

 

[Mr Matt]

Call apple directly. you may have to send it to them and if it is out of warranty you might have to pay for it to be repaired.

Thanks, but like I said I am in Thailand (way out in the countryside) so there is no Apple support here. I could ship it back to UK but the chances of it being stolen along the way is not worth the risk.

I've found a phone repair shop here where I can get a screen and connector for approx $100, I'm told it's an original part but I highly doubt it, trying to find out how to tell the fakes from the genuine parts.

So I'm going to try changing out the screen as I don't really have any other options, unless of course somebody here has any better advice....

 

[joe_fresh]

you could ship via fed ex. insure it with them and send directly to apple themselves.

 

[Mr Matt]

you could ship via fed ex. insure it with them and send directly to apple themselves.

And then pay Thai customs 30% plus another 7% of the full value of the phone AND 30% + 7% tax of the cost of the Fed Ex shipping too!

Then there's also the cost of the repair itself, altogether it's not a worthwhile option, but thanks for the reply. b

I'm looking at repair vids online, one thing I just found out about which immediate sticks out is the screen digitizer, if that does what I guess it does then a faulty digitizer could cause the fault I am seeing.

EDIT: I already take that back, it looks like the digitizer is for the touch screen and probably not related to my fault.

 

[3cit]

You were sent here because we are all igurus, and just because we tell you something you dont want to hear you assume we are wrong???
Your phone is toast. It's not the screen, it's the hardware.
The reason some screens work us because there's nothing to them! The apple logo is nothing more than a 32x32 png image on a black screen... How is that going to get "scrambled" ....
How long did it work after you bought it??

 

[Mr Matt]

15 months without any issues then after the screen started to slightly glitch occasionally a couple of weeks ago, it got worse and worse everyday until now it is just a mess of pixels in the iOS screens, you can no longer make out any of the screen like you could the other day.

The boot and shutdown screens are still normal.

So can you be more specific by "hardware"? What can cause this and what would I need to replace to fix it?

Im going to change out the whole screen assembly on monday to see if that fixes it.

 

[Mr Matt]

You were sent here because we are all igurus, and just because we tell you something you dont want to hear you assume we are wrong???
Your phone is toast. It's not the screen, it's the hardware.
The reason some screens work us because there's nothing to them! The apple logo is nothing more than a 32x32 png image on a black screen... How is that going to get "scrambled" ....
How long did it work after you bought it??

Oh yeah, the restore screen - the image of a usb cable and the blue iTunes icon, also still shows normally. Thats a more complicated image than the Apple logo but it's also not scrambled.

 

[Seely3500]

Matt did you get a resolution?? I'm having the same issues...

 

[Appler4]

Post a picture of it
or a video

 

[11B1P]

Oh yeah, the restore screen - the image of a usb cable and the blue iTunes icon, also still shows normally. Thats a more complicated image than the Apple logo but it's also not scrambled.

I think I have a customers phone with the same issue. The phones boots up ok, get the apple logo, but then the screen displays a few lines of scrambled images the width of the screen and blinks/scrolls down the screen. I connected a new screen and it did the same thing, so we know it isn't an LCD issue. I plugged it in for a restore and got a good image of the usb cable and itunes Icon as well, also eliminating an LCD issue. Successfully restored the phone os, but still got the scrambled images.

So can we say the motherboard is shot?