S-I-L bent his Android phone damaging the case but not enough to crack the screen. This being said he is unable to get it to power up. He attempted to change a board to his phone from another working identical phone to no avail.

He replaced the phone but there are some photos in there that he wants to retrieve. Newborn son, etc. He and I stopped at Best Buy and was told that they would send it out to a data recovery facility and it would run in the area of $500.00

That seems a bit steep to me. Does anybody have any suggestions or have actually used one of these services? And as another question am I being unreasonable to believe this can be done more economically?

Have you tried connecting to a computer via a usb cable?

I do not know, I'll have to ask him tomorrow. Hi did say that it would not power up or charge.

I'm pretty ignorant on these things.

Any chance this data is on a SIM card? If not perhaps the memory card can be removed and installed in another phone? I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, by the way, I’m just throwing ideas out there.

some save to a cloud account (on google usually). Some save to a memory card inserted in the phone - which may be ok and could be inserted into a new phone or computer.

What type of Android phone? Some have removable memory, some have built in wireless charging, some have manufacturer serviced cloud backup...