It happens to the best of us, it happens to the worst of us.
Types of Smartphone Damage
Hardware damage can occur when your phone is dropped, smashed, watered, thrown or stomped. It can bring a wealth of problems from cracked screens and rough scratches to broken home buttons (they are the worst!).
There are ways to rescue a phone that has dropped into water, no matter how miserable the situation looks! Here are the steps you need to take if you have a wet phone on your hands (both iPhones and Androids apply):
Unfortunately, the popular rice trick will not fix any internal shorts in your phone caused by the water. If your phone was powered on when it hit the liquid, it’s likely that the water would have hit the electrical board inside and caused a few shorts.
Taking your phone to a professional, or repairing the internals yourself is the only way to truly fix a water damaged phone.
With an Android phone, you can take the SD card out, plug it into a laptop or computer to save your data. You can find out how to do this by typing ‘remove SD card from [phone model]’ into Google. Providing that you saved data here, there is a chance that you can still access it.
Cracked screens aren’t as bad a fix as water damage or ongoing OS problems.
However, you won’t feel this way if you’re the one trying to read messages through what looks like a crystallised spiderweb! To fix this problem you can send the phone to a professional from an Apple genius bar or the Geek Squad. Alternatively if you’re feeling handy, you can do a DIY job with tutorials from ifixit.com.
Connecting a mouse to your phone will allow you to manoeuvre around the phone and access your data. You can find out if your phone is compatible with a USB OTG by checking the packaging it came in, or you can find the answer from Google.
Click!
However sometimes the home button will stop working. You can still access all areas on your iPhone if your home button is broken, by enabling AssistiveTouch.
- Open Settings
- Go to General
- Select Accessibility
- Under Interaction, tap AssistiveTouch
- Switch AssistiveTouch ON
Other Ways of Recovering Your Phone’s Data
A highly recommended data recovery software that I have personally used for iPhones, my friends Android devices and even my SD cards is Enigma Recovery. Similar to downloading iTunes, Chrome or AVG Antivirus, Enigma Recovery is a desktop software that you can download to desktop and use at your leisure.
Existing and Deleted data
Everytime you delete files like messages, contacts and calls from your phone, these items remain on the phone’s database until they are overwritten with new data. The program above can extract these hidden bits of data from your phone and help you restore them. Accidentally deleted texts, WhatsApp data, contacts and more can be recovered through this method.
To recover data from an iPhone you can either scan the device itself, or you can scan an iTunes backup of your phone, contained on your computer or laptop. You will have a backup of your iPhone located on your PC or laptop if you have ever synced the phone to iTunes.
In order to recover data from an Android, your phone will need to be rooted.