As anyone who has done this knows, getting information on and off a mobile phone is a PITA. What makes this particular time even more difficult is that the display on the phone is cracked and rendered completely useless. The staff at the store had told my client that nothing was recoverable from the phone. I was handed a samsung sync SGH-A707 and asked to try to get the contacts and pictures off the phone if at all possible. The things I needed to do this were:

• Samsung sync SCH-A707 phone
• Wall charger
• Samsung USB cable
• AT&T sim card
• Samsung PC Sync software
• BitPIM software
• Vista x64 laptop

Here is how I pulled it off:

1. The phone is without a sim card, so I took out the battery and inserted an old AT&T sim card I had laying around. Most phones don’t do anything without a sim card and this one was no exception

2. The battery was totally dead and the phone would not wake up from the USB cable. I plugged in the wall charger and the phone came to life. I could tell by the keypad lighting up and some silly noises coming from the phone.

3. Now I plugged in the phone to the usb cable to my laptop. Nothing comes up as a drive in ‘my computer’ but under device manager/modems I could see a samsung device!

4. I downloaded and installed the Samsung PC Sync Center software from the corporate website:

5. The PC Sync software let me view and export the contacts, but wouldn’t let me copy pictures off the phone! I guess this is how they try to make you pay for MMS or something. Anyway, I had about 250 pictures on the phone and wasn’t about to manually send all of those to my windows mobile phone just so I could copy them to the computer…

6. BitPIM to the rescue!
This program can do many many things, but I’m going to use it to manually view the files on the phone so I can easily copy off all the pictures at once.

7. Unfortunately, BitPIM needs a little tweaking to work with the A707. The basic steps are: Change the phone’s USB mode to Qualcom and tell BitPIM you have a SPH-A740. For specific steps, see this writeup at the synchole. It was written as a walkthrough to manually adding java games to the phone without having to download them OTA but it has the steps we need. Thanks much to the author of this post for listing the exact keystrokes to pull this off, since I had no display I just had to follow the steps and hope (they worked!). I didn’t have to download and use the Qualcom driver listed in the post, Vista x64 recognized the phone as something other than a Qualcom, but it worked just fine. If your pc recognizes the phone in Qualcom mode without loading the drivers, try BitPIM and you may get lucky like I did.

8. I opened up BitPIM and on the view menu clicked file system. This let me view ever single file on the phone. Nested in there was a directory called ‘graphics’ that had all the pictures that had been taken on the phone. I ‘saved’ one picture just to make sure it worked.

9. I right clicked the folder and selected backup entire folder. A few min later I was prompted to save a zip file on my pc with all the pictures.

Mission complete. I now have a .csv file with the contacts and a folder full of pictures. I don’t know what new type of phone the client is getting, but I’ll be sure to write up my adventures of putting this information onto the new phone.

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