Screen not responding at all. Suggestions?

[Lundon44]

Hey guys,

Need some help here. So my girlfriend has a GS5 that has recently failed her. She's a grade 1 teacher and has left the classroom to come back and find her phone with little chips in the paint from the kids wanting to play with it I guess. You think that would be a learning lesson for her to not leave it behind but apparently not. However, she did invest in a case.

Last week she returned to her classroom and found her phone's screen completely unresponsive. Nothing was working at all except the hardware buttons. She could reset the phone but could not enter her pin. She was most upset about the fact that she had a lot of pictures save on the phone storage that could not be retrieved because she says when the phone is plugged into a PC to access the internal storage that you must enter in the pin. She went back to Telus and they told her this was a rare issue and suggested she damaged the phone. She then clued it that it was probably one of the kids in the classroom that damaged the phone again. Though I find that odd considering she has a case on it. Regardless, Telus offered to send it into Samsung for servicing but warned her that this particular issue way require a new digitizer and a hefty repair fee. She's very stressed as it's close to Xmas, my birthday (tomorrow ), car repairs and the last thing she needs is to spend $200 on a phone repair. They've given her an lender phone for the last week and just came back and said she needs a new screen/digitizer. I guess the good news is that she wouldn't lose her media (I assume that doesn't require a factory reset).

But I was wondering if anyone had any other suggestions on a cheaper fix or even a way to retreive her media. She says that from now on she'll be sporting an otterbox case (which I feel are hidious) and no pin (very dumb idea). I've seen digitizers on eBay for about $100 plus shipping and I've offered to attempt a repair. Never did a digitizer replacement myself but I'm a pretty technical guy when it comes to PC's and phones so I feel it shouldn't be too difficult when following a YouTube tutorial lol.

 

[anon(19759)]

Photos don't get backed up to a cloud provider like Google Photos or OneDrive? Are you certain they are not on the memory card? I believe when you take the first picture, if you have a card installed it will ask if you want to store all future pics on the SD card. Maybe she didn't put in a card?

 

[Lundon44]

See that's what I thought. I don't use Android so I'm not not sure how they operate with cloud syncing. But I asked her and she seemed to be against cloud syncing so I assume she didn't have anything like that set up. She did have a memory card in but said that it was full of her old iPhone pics so the phone started saving the GS5 pics to the internal storage.

 

[Rukbat]

1) Find a shop with a spare S5 screen they can plug into her phone long enough to retrieve her data. (Having the shop repair the phone might save a little bit of money, but the first thing a reputable shop will do id a factory reset - so there's no personal data for their employees to steal. (In the stores I owned it was grounds for immediate dismissal if you didn't wipe the data from a phone as the first step, unless the customer had made prior arrangements to save the data - and I did those repairs personally. I wasn't risking my shops to the whim of some employee.)

2) Unless the case is steel and has half-inch thick walls, and is welded shut, 6 year olds will get into it and damage her phone over and over. Solution - never let the phone leave your person. (There was once a toy sold that was claimed to be indestructible. It took my then-3-year-old daughter about 15 minutes to tear the whole thing apart and have a table full of pieces. It took me over an hour to get it put back together again.)

3) Even if she doesn't like cloud backup, anything she doesn't want to lose should be backed up on her laptop or desktop. Always.

 

[SpookDroid]

Unfortunately if she had set a secure lockscreen, then yes, unless she unlocks the phone, the media cannot be accessed (hence the purpose of a secure lockscreen).

However, there are a few ways to get this done.

1) At a service center they could plug the phone in and use another digitizer. This would require them to tear the phone open, expose the innards, and connect a temporary service display. Not sure if they're willing to do this for free (or even for a fee) if you're not going to do the repair with them.

2) Get an OTG USB Cable and hook up an USB keyboard and/or mouse to the phone. That way you can unlock the phone via the keyboard, then manipulate the contents using the mouse. I'm not sure if you can or not, but this would also work with Bluetooth Keyboards/Mice if you can access the Bluetooth settings from the notification bar while the device is locked.

And as a tip, I'd suggest she backs up her media on the cloud. It really does help and with the bevvy of options out there, there's really reason why not to do this.

 

[anon(19759)]

See that's what I thought. I don't use Android so I'm not not sure how they operate with cloud syncing. But I asked her and she seemed to be against cloud syncing so I assume she didn't have anything like that set up. She did have a memory card in but said that it was full of her old iPhone pics so the phone started saving the GS5 pics to the internal storage.

Cloud works the same on Android as any other platform. All the same services are out there except icloud. Dropbox, box, google, onedrive, etc.

 

[Lundon44]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions here. I'll definitely relay some of these back to her