Flagship mobiles are getting pricier, which means you could be forced to pay a hefty fee if you smash the display or damage the battery. Before you contact the manufacturer, it’s worth looking at third-party alternatives to see if you could save some money. We’ll help you work out the cost. In our snapshot study on smartphone repair, we’ve compared prices from both the mobile manufacturers and third-party repair websites. Our featured brands include Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Google and Xiaomi. Keep scrolling for screen and battery repair costs. If your smartphone needs replacing entirely, invest in a top-tier replacement – see our selection of Which? Best Buy smartphones.Google Pixel mobile phone broken screen and battery replacement near me.
How much does it cost to fix a broken screen on a mobile phone?
New features on premium smartphones are driving prices (and therefore repair costs) higher. In recent years, we’ve seen a surge of phones with under-display fingerprint sensors and mechanical, pop-up front-facing cameras – these are intricate components that can be a pain to fix.
Based on the selection of smartphones we’ve featured above, the average repair cost for a broken screen is around £170. If your device is covered by warranty, you’ll either end up paying far less or nothing at all. But if you’ve dug deep into your wallet for a smartphone with a high retail price, you’ll want to be extra careful. Smash the display on Apple’s iPhone 12 Pro Max, for example, and you can expect to pay £316.44 to get it fixed by Apple if it’s out of warranty. You could buy a new Which? Best Buy smartphone for the same price. From the results above, you’ll notice that official repair costs for smashed displays usually work out cheaper compared to third-party alternatives. This isn’t the case 100% of the time, though – Apple charges £196 to fix a broken iPhone 11 screen, while Phones Rescue charges less than £100. Why aren’t some screen replacement repair costs listed? In some instances, we were unable to confirm a repair cost through the official route because the brand needs more information about the phone. This might even require sending the device to them to be analysed. If you’re considering using third-party repair, you may be out of luck here as well. We weren’t able to confirm that screens were repairable for five popular phones across any of the seven reputable third-party repair services we checked. If repair costs are something that might factor into your buying decision – or even if they just constitute ‘nice to know’ when you’re choosing a handset — it’s important to do your research in advance.
Batteries are far cheaper to fix than smartphone displays. In fact, our table above shows that the average repair cost for a broken battery (if you go directly through the manufacturer) is around £85. OnePlus is the cheapest of the bunch, charging just £13 to replace a dodgy battery. That’s reassuring if you want to give your smartphone a new lease of life, but you also need to consider support periods if a phone is more than a couple of years old.
