Also the little screen color that was once vibrant have now faded like reduction of the screen color, I think this is one of the bad side of hardware wallet, he claimed he bought it three years ago, but I told him he is to be blame, because the max year for a hardware wallet should be up to five years if you use it well, I end up telling him to get another one.
Looking at the hardware wallet, I don't like the sight of it, too many scratches, and I asked him why it looks so ugly, he claimed it fell few times before, like man, you can't be this careless with a hardware wallet.
Your friend might actually have treated that hardware wallet too roughly. Hardware wallet most properly are kept in save places that you don’t necessarily need to look at them just everyday and so. You check them once in a while to see if they haven’t been tampered with and only need to bring them out when you need them to sign transaction. To track your wallet addresses or balance you just need to import the address into any software wallet which will make create a watch only wallet there to be able track incoming transactions and broadcast your signed transactions. So you don’t necessarily need to have your hardware wallet at hand everyday except you sign transactions everyday.
So in short your funds there got lose? I think it can still be recoverable right since it has a paraphrase keys?
He should be able to recover those funds because almost all reputable hardware wallets have recovery seed phrases and private key that you can recover funds on it from either on another hardware wallet or even software wallets. The only way he can’t recover them is if he lost the seed phrase or forgot or also lost the passphrase if it was added. Damages or wear to hardware wallets is one of the reason why it is advise to back up recovery phrases offline and properly