I'm asking because I found this Nokia Lumia 520 windows phone, the screen is completely smashed and trying to slide, touch an app or button anywhere does not do anything.

But i took it apart and the screen (under the cracked touch screen), looks fine, displays fine when device is powered on, so here is my question:

If i buy a replacement touchscreen from ebay, for about 7$, do you think the touch function would be resolved?

In other words, does the cracks on the touch screen make it completely unresponsive until a crack free screen is installed, or, is very likely that i would not work because the problem is deeper than on the surface.

[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]For seven bucks it's not MUCH of a gamble...True, but the main question is, does a crack (in this case very serious) make the complete surface completely dead, like in the upper right of the screen.Yes it will, there is a very thin set of conductors FLOWING through the screen that are used to detect touch, a crack will totally wreck this rendering it useless. I cracked the digitiser on my laptop's screen and before I replaced it I had to physically disconnect it from the motherboard as it was causing the mouse cursor to jump around the screen wildly.It's still worth 7 Bucks to find out IMHO...I agree that $7 is worth the gamble... just be really careful with replacing digitizer. The glass can cut you up good or get glass splinters. I replaced a digitizer on a kindle fire and I have to say it was a royal pita. Took me about an hour to replace working very slowly to not damage kindle fire worse than it was and also not get glass shards EMBEDDED into me. You will need a heat gun to get the gum adhesive to soften for the digitizer to separate and if you get the device too hot you can kill it. You will need a pry kit or at minimum a guitar pick to use to break the bond between the gum adhesive that holds the digitizer to the body of the case. After you get digitizer off you will needs to remove all of the gum snot balls from the body of the device and prep it for the new digitizer to stick where the old one was. Best of luck if you take on this project, and be careful and slow. Here are some pics of the digitizer I had to replace. I went to youtube that showed the procedure too before digging into it to be as safe as I could to not ruin the kindle fire that was $150 back in the day, and the digitizer replacement was $30 on amazon to fix it + a $7 pry kit from newegg which came with pry tools and guitar pick etc.



[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]thanks i bought the part and it also came with MANY tiny tools very useful to repair small devices so the price was a sure deal, i'll cross my fingers.I'll just add that different screens react differently to cracks, I don't know enough about the different technologies involved to be able to give a very detailed answer but I can say that every single Lumia 520 I've seen with a cracked screen, the touchscreen has been completely unresponsive. Where I used to work, we deployed Windows phones to about 200 people so believe me, I SAW quite a few cracked screens heh - if I remember right, the 720's touchscreen still sometimes worked depending where the crack was, but the 520's were always completely nonfunctional.