Like many people, I have a smart phone. In my case it is a Samsung Galaxy SII which I have had for about 21 months.
It isn’t perfect. If it was up to me the changes I would make are:
- Give it a decent battery life, even at the expense of making it thicker and heavier.
- …
Yep, that is about the only change I would make. Everything else about it has been fine.
Until the weekend. Then my phone died, and it is resolutely refusing to come back again.
Being of a tinkering persuasion I chose to investigate a little. I managed to find a colleague who had the same phone so I could borrow the battery. Putting the battery from his phone in mine made no difference, so the battery wasn’t the source of the problem.
I then asked another colleague who works in the electronics workshop where I work to prod a few things with a multimeter to see what he could see. He came back pretty quickly to say that when he plugged the phone in he could see a voltage, but that the voltage disappeared when he pressed the on button. He suspected a short somewhere in the body of the battery.
So there was nothing for it but to go and see the nearest Carphone Warehouse shop, which is, luckily only 5 minutes walk away.
The best news is that my phone, being a Samsung, has a two year warranty, and it was still within the warranty period. So its wending its way, who knows where. Unfortunately the store didn’t have any loan phones available, so I left the store feeling very ‘old skool’ without a phone of any kind.
I tried my old HTC phone (HTC Desire) when I got home, and, as both phones are ‘on’ Orange the old phone works with the sim card.
It did leave me with a couple of observations:
- The screen, which once felt perfectly acceptable, now feels tiny!
- When you are used to new tech, then old tech feels glacially slow.
- Both phones are Android, which means that all the contacts etc are available on the old phone. But many of the apps which I would like to install (Chrome, please, the stock browser is horrible) claim to be installed already.
I have a feeling I will get these teething troubles sorted out, just about the time that my proper phone returns to my grateful hands.