My phone screen is shattered, totally un-usable. When I plug it into my computer (Linux Mint) it is recognized but I can not enter pin to unlock the screen and also USB debugging is not enabled :(
Is there any way to get the fotos and stuff off the phone?
If you have a usb OTG cable/adapter and the phone supports it, you can plug a mouse and keyboard into it and use it like that. I’ve also used an adapter that outputted to hdmi
HDMI good idea!
Depending on the models involved, some phones work with a standard PC USB-C stocking station. You might already have one of these for work.
How do a mouse and keyboard help if the screen doesn’t work? Are you supposed to just guess where the cursor is?
If you can get a usb to hdmi thingy to work too you can peolly work around it
A broken touchscreen doesn’t mean you can’t see what’s on the screen. OP said its “unusable”, but we don’t know if that just means just the touch is unusable or if the actual LCD/LED is damaged as well.
Most people have no idea you can use a mouse or keyboard on the phone at all, so they’d consider the touch not working to mean the entire phone is unusable since they can’t interact with it the one way they’ve ever used.
We just don’t really have all the information, we don’t need to be making assumptions that could easily be wrong as well and ignore possible easy solutions for their problem.
You are right, thank you. The screen shows 3-4 verticle lines of working pixels (about 1/3 of screen length), everything else is black. The lines comes when phone is turned on with power button and off when phone is turned off, so, phone still works somewhat.
Does that give you any ideas??
They said screen, not just the touch input.
You haven’t worked a customer service or support position before have you? Not everyone has the same explicit definitions for things. You don’t know what they consider the “screen” on their device. I worked in retail repairing phones for over a decade and saw customers refer to “screen” for every different component of the touchscreen assembly. and sometimes things completely unrelated to the display or touch at all. And that doesn’t even get into the possibility of language differences when we’re talking in an online community like lemmy.
At a separate job handling insurance replacements and reimbursements, I had a customer one time argue when processing a replacement TV for their current one that wouldn’t turn on. They were extremely insistent that it wasn’t broken. It wouldn’t turn on, but it wasn’t broken. Their definition of “broken” only meant physical damage, something just not working at all wasn’t broken. Hell, people still refer to the computer monitor as the computer, or the tower/box as the CPU.
We also don’t know how bad the damage to the screen assembly is without a photo at least. It could be that the LCD/LED is damaged and not clearly visible, but enough of it is still visible to enter your PIN if you can find a way around the touch interaction. We’re missing information, and making assumptions about the situation based on explicit definitions that you know doesn’t necessarily translate to an end user.
No, they try not to let me near the customers.
I wish they’d do the same with me. Customer Support wears on your soul in a way most other jobs don’t come anywhere near.
And technical support becomes this weird combination of accuracy for troubleshooting and diagnosis, combined with a client that lies to you (often they don’t know they’re lying, sometimes they do) about the issue or what their role is with the issue. Actually now that I think about it, seems a lot like medicine. House actually has a lot of parallels with technical support.
Haha, I’ve definitely noted the House parallel before! I once gave a presentation to my team where “everybody lies” was the main focus. Extracting the correct information even from other engineers can be a real exercise. I eventually came up with the exact seventeen words necessary to get QA to tell you exactly what the problem was, and I felt like a real techno-mage.
I’ve led a privileged life where I never had to hold a customer service role, as I’m confident that shoveling horse manure is more pleasant.
I recently faced a similar problem with a phone that had its screen slowly turning black after it was accidentally dropped. The process of turning black lasted about two days so I was able to react. First thing I did was remove any device locking method (PIN, face unlock etc) so that this would not get in the way once the screen was completely unusable. I then allowed device debugging via USB and used scrcpy (link to scrcpy on github) to mirror the screen to my Linux PC (and control the device via mouse). Through this, I was able to move any data I still needed away from the device even after the screen was completely black There are precompiled binaries for scrcpy on the GitHub project site.
Yeah scrcpy is a lifesaver. I have successuflly used scrcpy-GUI (together with an OTG adapter for a mouse) in the past, but my screen was partly usable, so I could see and did not have to do too much adb/fastboot magic.
If OPs screen is broken and they did not do anything beforehand, I would have no idea how to proceed, since HDMI alternate mode seems (still) not very widespread.
Does your touchscreen still accept input? If it does, you can try locking your screen, pressing the power button (a non-brocken screen would turn on) and hold down both volume buttons to enable Talkback.
Talkback will read aloud what is visible on the screen. If you never configured it, it might be hard to understand depending on your language settings and the talking speed.
But with some patience you should be able to navigate to where you need to and enable the USB datatransfer to backup your data or navigate to the settings menu to enable ADB debugging for a full adb backup.
Good idea!
HDMI and a mouse, maybe?
If you have the various cables you might be able to connect it to a screen via HDMI and a mouse via USB on-the-go, but otherwise it’s gonna have to be a screen replacement. You might be able to get a really cheap one that won’t last long, but will let you get data onto a computer.
Its not insurmountably difficult to replace screens on most phones.
