Insider’s Secrets about Refurbished Mobile Phones in Huaqiangbei Electronic Markets

If you are looking for a branded mobile phone without the exorbitant price tag of original counterpart and wondering where to buy refurbished phones, huaqiangbei’s definitely your destination. The focal point is Yuanwang digital mall in the central of huaqiangbei shopping street.

With an astonishing number of refurbished mobile phones, shanzhai (cheap imitative knockoffs), mobile phone parts like LCDs, batteries, buttons, housings and repair workshops, Yuanwang offers a more feasible solution to assemble your mobile phone from scratch or get a refurbished mobile phone at a small fraction of price. However, you need to know the game behind to avoid being scammed.

Here’s a process of refurbishing mobile phones from a friend working in Huaqiangbei.

Here’s a phone with small cracks. Now we have to refurbish it into a new one. All we need are a new screen, a new case and a set of tools for refurbishing iPhones. The target is to remove all the mobile parts from old phone to the new case.

It’s not hard to open iPhones as long as you have a complete set of tools. First, open the phone and take off the screen.

Then remove the vibrator, sticker and battery.

Next comes to removing the rear camera, GPS and signal module. After removing these parts, now it’s easy to access the motherboard, the quintessence in a phone.

The speaker and charging port should also be taken off with the motherboard. Then it comes to the small parts on the motherboard including vibrator, keypad flex cable, audio earphone flex cable.

Now every part in the old case has been removed. It’s time to assemble them into the new case in reverse order.

After the new case is ready, it’s time to get on the new screen. The same principle with removing mobile parts from the old case, all the parts in the old screen have to be removed and placed in the new screen in reverse order.

Refurbished screen without front camera, sensor and Home button. It takes around half an hour to remove the parts and assemble them into the new screen.

To test whether the phone works or not, you have to connect the screen flex cable with the case, turn on the mobile and make sure all the functions are working smoothly.

To make the refurbished mobile phones as exactly as the original ones, don’t forget to print the codes on the back of the case as you can easily find shops offering code printing service in Yuanwang digital mall at the price of 0.5 usd/piece. After code printing, repacking, sticking the new labels, you’ll get a new refurbished iPhone which green hands can’t tell apart from first glance 🙂