Getting a New Cell Phone

My devices fail suddenly.  Boost phone got wet.  The phone that replaced it failed to take a charge.  I had to replace it on short notice a week before my Adriatic cruise.  The phone that replaced it, my current Samsung Galaxy J7 Star, had no serious issues in its not quite four years of faithful service.  Yet it took an unanticipated wave from the sea, never quite working right in the four days that followed.  Initially it had an overheated message, then auto shutoff.  I went to the T-Mobile store to see about repairs or replacement, writing down the model numbers of their affordable inventory.  I selected one, but by the following day, the phone worked fairly well, though the speaker never recovered.  I could get sound with headphone but not with the telephone or You Tubes.  Damaged beyond repair.  I had one false alarm previously, dropping it on the concrete front walk resulting in a glass crack.  Followed online repair, small enough to stabilize with some superglue.  No loss of function that time.  Followed the self-helps on the WWW, no luck.  Time for a new phone.

This sort of brings me to a branch point.  The path of least resistance would be to go to the T-Mobile store and get one of theirs.  Not that T-Mobile endeared themselves to me.  Never liked going to the store, reminds me too much of my synagogue where very little thinking goes on and the staff really don't register anything you try to tell them.  T-Mobile telephone agents have been a better experience but I often didn't get what I wanted.  If the price of other carriers is comparable, I'm open to a different company.  Could go to Staples, maybe should. I did.  They abandoned their in store cell phone business. Probably shouldn't go to Best Buy, but could at least take a look.  Sufficiently deterred by my last two times there not to give it third round.  I'm not desperate for a replacement and can still get sound with earbud use.  Check the options.  Decide by day's end.

In the meantime, I went to Target which had options that I mostly didn't understand.  So I called my friend in NYC who does understand.  Advice:  stay simple.  Just go back to T-Mobile, get one of their phones and pay them to set it up.  So that's what I did.  Chose the one I preferred from the list I made a few days earlier.  Setting it up not straightforward.  I wanted this straightforward.  To do that I needed to select another Samsung Phone.  They had one in my budget, so now we're ready to go.  The agent plugged stuff in.  I added a new charger and a screen protector, as cracked screen from dropping is the most likely source of premature demise not covered by warranty.  Agent said all done.  Since it has C-cords, I went to Five Below down the road apiece, purchasing one cord with a C-insert at each end and another with a C-port for the phone and a USB port for my car's outlet to use it when driving.  

As soon as I got in my car, I realized that the Toyota App did not transfer.  Neither did any of my other apps.  I reinstalled Toyota, paired my new phone, confirmed that I could connect to the car's navigation system.  Then home, more than a little irritated as I settled on the Samsung brand because it could make the new phone identical to my old one.  My wife being a much nicer person than me, most notably when I am irate, we both headed back to the T-Mobile store.  Yes, the apps should have transferred but that requires a minimum level of charge on the old device, which it didn't have.  So I charged it in the store, he then transferred the apps and confirmed that the transfer would complete in an hour or so even when no longer plugged in.  

I returned home with all my stuff in the pink paper shopping bag with the T-Mobile logo.  Left it on a kitchen chair overnight.  The apps all transferred, though they appear on the new screen in a different order than the old one.  But I think I'm ready to do things that I did with the previous device.  I can check email, access the internet, take pictures, make a YouTube additions to my dr. plotzker's mind series, read library books from Hoopla, and ignore text messages.  A bit more of an ordeal than I would have liked.  Takes some time getting used to the new format.  Generally my phones last four years or so, almost regarded as semi-disposables, but I anticipated nearly full restoration of previous utility soon.