Question about a board from an amateur

Adam wrote 03/03/2015 at 12:31 2 points

Hello!

I have read HAD for years. I love the projects and creativity of the people around the world. I rarely mess with anything electronic at any sort of micro level. I hope this is OK to post here.

The other day, a friend of a friend asked me to look at a dead phone (Samsung Galaxy S4). The phone's power switch is messed up, as far as I can tell. I found a few sites and YouTube videos documenting the same issue and showing that replacing the power button will fix it. They already have a new phone, but they want a few pictures off of the phone. The pictures are not important enough to send the phone off, but they wanted me to give it a shot before trashing the phone.

I was able to pop the old switch off the board. I then started cleaning up the leftover solder. I put some copper desoldering braid on it to get the last of it up. However, as I was removing the braid, part of it stuck just a little bit. When it came off, a little pinkish square was attached to the bottom of it in the solder. It looks like a contact or something. The board, where there was a square solder spot, there is now a greyish square. Testing continuity there yields nothing.

I didn't hold the soldering iron on the board for a prolonged time or anything, and I didn't pull hard to get the braid off. It was all just one motion, but a little bit cooled before I pulled it off. So, I have a few questions:

1. Is my description enough to figure out what I am talking about?
2. If so, is there anything else I can do to recover from my position?
2a. That is, can I reattach something like that or am I screwed?

Sorry to throw out a dumb situation. I am just in over my head on something like this. The extent of my soldering experience has been on simpler projects with much, much larger working areas.