Lovefone

Smashed your phone? Unsmash it here!

Several years ago, during the early days of the iPhone and before Lovefone (http://lovefone.co.uk/), Alex Perjescu was working by himself as a Mac repair specialist (or as he liked to call it, 'undercover Genius'), travelling across London repairing Macs for everyone from graphic designers in Shoreditch to multi-millionaires in Mayfair.

He started to noticing a trend: customers began asking if he could replace their broken iPhone screens. There were no other companies currently offering this, so Alex decided to take a leap and start doing it himself. Learning from scratch meant that the first repair didn't go so well – Alex had to take the phone home, and it took 48 hours to successfully do the replacement. Luckily it was for a patient customer.

By Feb 2010, Alex was the go-to man for iPhone repairs, and had even been featured on BBC's Working Lunch (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8304520.stm). Completely inundated with repairs, Alex followed a customer's suggestion to turn his talent into a 'proper business'. Together with several friends, Alex went ahead. Over a year later, Lovefone now has an office in the glamorous Charlotte St (though in the slightly less glamorous Hogarth House, at number 64 –  an 19th century bordello).
He repaired Jon Snow's phone last year and after he tweeted about us to his 21,000 followers Lovefone saw a massive spike in website traffic. Lovefone now repair iPods and iPads too.



How are phones broken
"The majority of repairs we do are for broken iPhone, iPod touch and iPad screens.
Unexpectedly, drunken nights out aren't the major course of damage – young children and (more mundanely) getting out of cars and dropping the phone seem to be the biggest causes."

The weirdest repair
"Fixing a phone that had been baked in an oven with an Apple Crumble for 45 minutes. It has got water damaged and the owner had decided to dry it off in a low heat in the oven (not to be recommended). Unfortunately he didn't tell his wife, who put was just about to do some baking at the time."

The worst damaged phones
"Apart from the screen and glass back, the iPhone 4 seems to be virtually indestructible. We've completely repaired two phones that have been driven over by cars. One involved hammering the frame back into shape. We've also repaired two iPhone 4s that have been dropped off the tops of tower blocks."

Phones we couldn't save
"The iPhone 4 that was smashed with a hammer by an angry (now ex-)girlfriend and the iPhone 3GS that was thrown at a window by an angry sister!"