Who wants a pink iPhone? I do! I do!

You'd think that with all the leaps and bounds that Apple has taken that they'd have the common sense to make custom color iPhones...especially in pink and/or blue for the ladies! Don't they know that if you build it in pink, we will buy it? Sure, maybe it doesn't make any business sense, but you'd have to admit it would be pretty cool!

Yes, I am aware that there are thousands of neat-o colored cases that you can buy for the iPhone but...it's just not the same. I don't want a more protective yet super bulky casing, I like the iPhone for being a sleek and sexy beast...I only wish it were pink to match the rest of the million other pink and blue items I already have. So how does one go about making their standard iPhone a custom color? Well...there is the obvious, you could paint it, but again...it's just not the same.

I turned to ebay, my number one destination to find all things that you can't seem to find in stores (at least not in Canadian stores anyways, urgh) and sure enough my search of "pink iPhone back" came up with the solution I was looking for! Oh ebay, how I love you. It turns out most people refer to this backing as the "housing" and the chrome frame as the "bezel". So I ordered this pink housing kit and of course...decided to attempt this iPhone color surgery myself.

I'm sure there are places in your city that will do iPhone repairs and may do housing swaps, but the one place in Calgary that does repairs...refused to swap out the housing just for cosmetic reasons (another reason why I did this myself!). Bah. After a lot of research when my pink housing arrived, I ended up using this YouTube video as my main resource in taking apart my iPhone http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVKjCi35GGk. How did I put it back together you ask? I seriously just performed the steps in the video backwards which did take a lengthy amount of time to put back together.

I would like to add a note that you simply cannot just "pop off" the housing and do a simple swap, the way Apple designed the iPhone is that all of the components (battery, wiring, screws, etc.) are attached directly onto that housing and you must "gut" your ENTIRE iPhone in order to do the switch. Here's the process in a nutshell:

Unscrew 2 screws at bottom of phone, pop off screen CAREFULLY, open iPhone, unhinge 7 connector straps, unscrew main screws, pop out motherboard, unscrew more screws, pop out speakers, unscrew more screws, pop out vibrating unit, unscrew more screws, pop out camera, pop out battery, unscrew a million other screws, pop out volume button, headset jack/antenna, vibrate toggle button, power button, camera lens, pop off bezel frame from original housing, glue together the new housing and bezel, wait to dry, start screwing in screws to the new housing and do everything I just did in reverse to put it back together.

OI. Once you actually know what you're doing, it takes about 15 minutes to disassemble your iPhone...the tricky part is putting it back together and has taken me approximately 3 hours on both occasions.

The result? A sweet customized iPhone that virtually nobody else has...and all the bragging rights you can handle ;)