Bricked iPhone? is it recoverable?

[qbazdz]

Hi,

My dad has a very old iPhone 4 (A1332) which recently just packed up and gets stuck on the apple logo (bootloader?).
I can't help him in person as he is travelling but he popped into a few shops and they tried a few things with no luck.
I asked him to get the iTunes on and hook it up to his laptop and on connection iTunes attempted to do auto recovery and failed with restoring it with 'unknown error (9)' message.

I'm more of an Android guy so can't really help him, but suspect the phone is a goner. Any ideas?

 

[qbazdz]

Yep - I directed him there too, but where he is currently there aren't many around.
He is not totally keen on changing the handset, but equally there is not much data on it that he would actually miss.

 

[qbazdz]

Totally agree.
I found initial troubleshooting guide on Apple's website for this error so will give this a go in a first instance but I think the phone is on last legs (or dead) even if we recover anything.