How do I copy contacts (& maybe texts) from my phone with a broken screen to my new one?

[AC Question]

I dropped my Samsung S4 and now the screen is dead. I got a replacement Android phone (Ace 4) and none of my contacts are synced.
How do i go about retrieving/transferring them from the old phone to the new one.
I can access the files that are stored on the phone using the USB cable and laptop but I don't know which files/folder I'm looking for.
Any help?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! I assume all of those contacts were saved to the local Phone account only, and not your Google account, correct? This is why it's best to save contacts to your Google account--they sync automatically to your Google Contacts in the cloud, where they're safe in case something happens to the phone.

The problem with locally saved contacts is that they're saved in an SQLite database file in a protected system directory. So you'd have to root the phone to access the file, and even then, it'd be hard to retrieve the actual contacts from that database.

You'd have to somehow mirror the phone screen to a display (using an MHL adapter) and connect a pointing device like a mouse via OTG. MHL and OTG use the same microUSB port, and I'm not sure if it can handle both at the same time.