After my unanticipated dunk in the lake with my smartphone (available here), the rice did not work as well as I had originally thought. Thankfully all the data was restored and accessible, but the camera never worked again. Selecting the camera icon resulted in a black screen that consequently caused other weird things to happen. Also the battery only lasted about 5 hours, max. Even when turned off, the battery was still draining itself. I figured it was just a matter of time before something disastrous happened.
I know some people are constantly upgrading and switching their devices for the latest and greatest. However, I like to set everything up and then use it for as long as possible (basically until the device breaks or becomes too outdated).
The smartphone is newer so it has a few different capabilities from the previous model and some of the settings behave differently. Some of the integration options are different, or no longer available, resulting in lots of Google searches. I’m still figuring out what it can do and where everything “lives”. For example, if I want the timer to sound an alarm, the ringer must be turned on for everything in the phone. Since I use the timer when I meditate, I don’t want the phone tweeting and chirping for anything except the end of the timer. I’m also a little bit sad the new model doesn’t come with the same default seagull-ocean ring tone.
The transition was not as smooth as I had anticipated despite the fact that my phone hardly contained any unique content. For example, most of my pictures were available in other places and my contacts were all in gmail. Naturally I was quite surprised when I logged in and the contacts didn’t just appear.
Even worse, the manager at the shop attempted to move all my contacts from one phone to the other through a bluetooth connection. The end result was hundreds of contacts appearing, full of duplicates (many of which had to be adjusted manually) and all kinds of weird email addresses that I had used maybe once a long time ago. I’m still figuring out which settings control this kind of thing.
Obviously I need to invest more time learning how to backup everything, including the apps, so I don’t have to reinstall everything if something else happens.
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