iPhone5 Battery Replacement & inital GPS problem

Mijn probleem

The original battery life was suffering after ~18 months of use.

Mijn oplossing

In the end the repair was successful. However, I did have to take the phone apart again after the battery replacement because one cable had become disconnected during the initial repair work without me noticing it. It turns out that cable must route the gps signal to the main board since neither Google nor Apple maps could get a tight read on my position immediately after. Presumably they were both using wifi and/or cell locations to get a rough estimate. Not good enough for map navigation however.

Mijn advies

The repair takes some dexterity for sure and the amount of force required to remove the screen, internal cable connectors, and the battery was disconcerting at times. In addition, while unscrewing the various tiny screws was not too difficult, re-inserting them was not simple. The trick is to get the screws to stick to the tips of the drivers (I used a tiny bit of good old fashioned spit in the driver tips to do so).

Finally, I had to reconnect the gps cable after the mapping problems I described above. Fortunately this was easy after opening the phone again. Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of which cable was the culprit but it was one of the three near the upper right corner of the battery. I'm 80% sure it was the one closest to the corner.

So if you have GPS problems after replacing your battery, double check that you didn't accidentally disconnect a cable you weren't supposed to.