I spent a little bit of time earlier messing around with my test board:
My initial thoughts are that the magnifying glass is useless for working with but fine for checking how you are getting on between doing little bits. My soldering iron is too fine for cleanup using wick, so I need an iron with a flat rather than a pointy tip. When I took the bga chip off it came off really clean and with a pair of tweezers rather than the little screwdriver that i used to take them off I wouldn't have knocked off a tiny resistor above the chip.
The hot air station thing is actually pretty good, I was messing around with the air speed and working out the melting points of the solder on this board and it seems to do a good enough job for what I need to do for now. I'm sure if I used a much better one Id notice all the differences but for me right now it seems to be fine, It blows hot air out up to 450 degrees and really that's all you need. On this Samsung board I was up at about 390 degrees with a slow air speed of around 3 for a few minutes in the area of the bga chip with tape all around it holding everything else in place and that seemed to work.
I was trying to get every last bit of solder off of the area where the chip was sitting with the iron and a wick and knocked off one of the pads where the bga should be seated, I was kinda testing the process before i start the phone so now i'm thinking that I might need another solding iron as well. something a bit bigger but still cheap. The other option is find another head for my current iron.
Final observation, today i was testing using the liquid flux and to be honest it seems to dissipate really quickly and i didn't really get the impression it was helping me all that much. I'll move onto some of the gel stuff tomorrow or when them tweezers turn up to have a little go with that and see how it feels.