It's hard to understand Shenzhen if you've not been there. I just returned from the Dangerous Prototypes Hackercamp in Shenzhen, and quite frankly, I don't think there is anyway you can fully comprehend what they can do there if you haven't seen it with your own eyes. Such things as replacing the glass are completely routine and done with incredible speed and precision. They have tools and techniques there not found anywhere else.

I ran into Ian and Jin from Dangerous Prototypes at the SF Bay MakerFaire last weekend where they were demonstrating the BGA reballing techniques we learned at the Land Mobile Repair School in Shenzhen. Ian told me that earlier in the Faire, a couple of Intel engineers stopped by to tell him that what he was doing was wrong, incorrect and impossible (or some combination thereof). He ran them through the process and left them agog, not only that the process developed by the Chinese (about $50USD in tools and supplies) was comparable to a $XX,000 reballing machine, but that they'd never seen or heard of these techniques before. They were throwing away prototypes worth thousands of dollars instead of fixing the problem because they didn't have proper reballing machines/jigs.

It is well worth the trip to Shenzhen if only to see them disassemble a phone completely and refurb it faster than imaginable. Ian hopes to make HCS a regular event and I highly recommend it!

For someone without the contacts, can you recommend a way to plug-in to the scene? This hackercamp sounds interesting .. any more on the way?

Not all phones are so stuck-together as the iPhone, though. I cracked the glass my Lumia 920 and I'm considering just replacing the digitizer. The replacement is $15 on Amazon compared to $45 for the screen.