Suffering a Bad Digitizer

There isn’t much more devastating than hearing you have a bad digitizer.

Actually, there is something worse: learning what a digitizer is and then finding out yours has entered a kind of rapid death spiral.

Okay, you may have a couple of questions here.  I certainly did yesterday when I took my smarter-than-me-phone to Costco to see why my touch screen kept going black and I lost all touch functions.

What is a digitizer?

Believe it or not, a digitizer is the layer of glass above the LCD screen in your smartphone.  When you touch the digitizer glass, you interact with an electrical field present in the digitizer.  The digitizer transmits and receives signals based on where you touch the screen.  These signals are then interpreted as the commands and functions you are so familiar with.  The LCD screen and the digitizer operate independently from one another.

My screen started going black on Saturday.  It would fall black at random times. By yesterday morning, the screen would fall black and unresponsive as soon as I placed a call.  I could not even punch in my passcode to retrieve voicemails.

Several things occurred to me as I faced my black screen.  First I have no other phone.  I dumped my landIine a couple years ago.  Secondly, I no longer have any phone numbers memorized.  I could not call anyone even if someone handed me a working phone.  And what of my photographs, emails, and cat-jump fail videos?

I took my phone to the phone kiosk at Costco as soon as they opened yesterday. 

“Failing digitizer,” the wizard at the kiosk said grimly.

“That sounds bad.”

“Yep.  Bad.”

“I think I want a new phone.”

“Yep.  Good.”

After several screen crashes and working around my failure to recall my four digit Verizon passcode, the wizard transferred all of my vitals from my old phone to the new.  In less that than an hour, I was walked away with a new phone.

My new digitizer is beautiful.

--Mitchell Hegman