iPhone 4 SIM damage, salvage contacts?

One of our employees decided to give his new iPhone 4 a bath last week. When he brought it to me, it would not power on whatsoever. I told him to try the good old bag of rice trick.

He brought it back in this morning and it seems to have dried out enough to power on and tell us to connect the phone to iTunes to do a restore. However, when I connect it to the computer, iTunes tells me that there is no SIM card installed (although there definitely is...I have tried the old one as well as two brand new SIM cards.)

The phone and memory still seem to be intact as Windows pops up the Scanner and Camera Wizard and I was able to save all of his pictures. Unfortunately, when he purchased the phone, his son set up his Apple store account so that he could buy apps, but did not do anything further, so there is no previous iTunes sync with a computer with any other information backed up.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what we could try in order to retrieve his contacts from the phone in the state that it is currently in? I tried a program called Cucusoft iPhone Contacts + SMS backup that claimed it would do that, but it just kept crashing on me.

If the iPhone has internal damage caused by the water, it's unlikely you will be able to salvage anything from either the SIM card or phone internal memory. Tell him to take the iPhone and SIM card to his local Apple store and let them see if they can salvage anything from it. They can also provide him with a new refurbished iPhone for a flat fee.

I was hoping that the internal memory would still be intact because of the fact that his pictures were still there. I tried three different programs that claimed they would allow you to bypass iTunes to pull contacts, but none of them would work. One of them gave access to the pictures but said that the contacts, SMS, call history, etc was empty.

It isn't a huge deal as he went down and picked up a replacement already. I was just trying to do him a favor and salvage his contacts that weren't in our company's global address list.

I would have taken it in to an Apple store, but the closest is about three hours away. If I have some free time in the next few weeks, I may see if i can make it out to one.