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You drop your phone and the screen shatters. Ugh. While you’ve probably been smart about putting your critical data on the cloud— right?[br]—there might be some things you still want to extract from your smartphone before you take it in for repair or swap it out for a new one. Or you not be in a position to afford a new phone right now. How do you continue to use your phone when the screen is cracked?[br]Do you have a tech question keeping you up at night? Tired of troubleshooting your Windows or Mac? Looking for advice on apps, browser extensions, or utilities you can use to accomplish a particular task? Let us know! [br]The only time I ever cracked a smartphone screen is when I accidentally dropped my iPhone 4S into a pool. (Waterproofing—er,[br]water resistance —didn’t come until the iPhone 7.)[br]That said, there are a number of other experts who know their way around broken screens, and there is a little salvation for you whether you’re dealing with a shattered iPhone or Android device. You’ll have more luck if the screen is partly shattered and some part of it responds to your commands, and less luck if you can’t get your finger-tapping to work at all.[br][br]IF YOUR ANDROID SMARTPHONE’S SCREEN IS BROKEN...[br][br][br]If you have the right converter for your Android device, you can do the same keyboard trick: plug an old USB keyboard directly into a [your phone’s connection]-to-USB converter (likely an OTG cable), and you should be able to just type in a PIN code to unlock your device. You can even connect to your smartphone with a Bluetooth mouse, if you want to get fancy.[br]You can also try enabling MTP mode for your smartphone so you can transfer files off it—and you’ll probably want to do a quick Web search to make sure you have the right steps for your specific Android device. If your device has USB Debugging mode already on, or you can turn it on, you can also try a tool like Scrcpy to control your device over a typical USB connection to your desktop or laptop. Samsung’s Smart Switch software or Kies might also be able to help you out, if either is applicable.[br]Basically, if you can somehow get MTP enabled to transfer files off manually, or USB debugging mode to use a variety of apps (or[br]ADB ) to rip files off of your device, you’ll be OK. In some cases, just authenticating into your device and launching a manual backup should be enough.[br][br][br] |
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