One of our employees cracked the digitizer on his Galaxy 8 a few days ago. The screen started flickering yesterday and going crazy, completely unusable. I checked it yesterday and realized the screen was cracked too. If it was just the digitizer I would have repaired it. Since the screen was cracked, I chose to use our insurance through AT&T. They overnited another phone that arrived this morning. Setting up the new phone was a simple task as everything is backed up to Samsung Cloud and Google....... usually. Since the phones were the same I used the sim card from the original in the new phone. I signed him in and all seemed to install and populate fine.
Later he came to me and said that two years worth of videos and pictures were not on the phone. I usually do not choose to recover pictures as I set all the phones to save them to the SD card. As it turned out, the office manager had set his phone up when he received it.... not me. She did not set the camera to save to card. Photos were not set to backup either.
With the flickering screen on the old phone we could not use the touch screen. I ended up using the OTG plug that came with the phone. I plugged it into the phone, then plugged a mouse into that. Worked like a charm. I could see the mouse cursor on the phone and was able to enter the pattern to unlock the phone even with it flickering.
After that I simply plugged the phone into my computer and copied the files over like normal. I was also able to reset the phone to factory before shipping it back.
I have handled and repaired Android phones for years and have never used a mouse or separate keyboard on one.... till today.
Thought it was worth passing along if anyone else might find it useful.
