whining about cell phones
Jun. 11th, 2020 08:44 pmSo I decided on the Pixel 3a (though ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
eglantier, if OnePlus ever makes a smaller phone that is compatible with Verizon I will be right there so fast).
Good but at the time annoying thing about this phone: twelve hours after I bought it from Amazon, Google helpfully sent me an article ("since you've been thinking about a Pixel!") telling me the price went down by about $100. Amazon no longer does price matches. While I was considering this, they also ran out of stock. Also apparently I have strong feelings about not rewarding Amazon for no longer doing price matching. So I returned the one from Amazon and bought from Walmart.com. It was a very smooth transaction.
I had expected Verizon to be the most irritating part of this whole process, but it turned out to be the easiest. Well, it wouldn't let me get a sim card online without changing my phone number (??) but I made a local appointment online, told them what I wanted, they were like, that's totally simple, and went to the store. The guy quite sensibly refused to touch my phone but that was OK because all I needed was the sim card (and for him to open my sim card tray, because I'd forgotten to bring the tool). It all went very smoothly.
Good things about this phone: the camera is, as promised, very good. And there are apps for manual control of the camera! It doesn't have the Samsung bloatware apps which makes me happy every time I look at my apps and I don't have to look at a bunch of things like NFL App and Flipbook and things that I just have no need for. In general it is kind of crazy to have a phone that actually... works... and doesn't lag everything because it's running out of memory... and in general living in 2019/2020 instead of 2014.I was also concerned about the battery life, but it turns out to be a lot better than my old S5, so that's good too. The rapid charging is pretty great. The fingerprint sensor took me about half a day to get used to and now I am hooked on it.
Bad things about this phone: Google already knows everything about me, not sure I want it to know even more. Although it is less wide than my old phone (good), it is slightly longer (BAD, and with bad repercussions, as you will see). It's good I didn't get a phone that was any longer, I guess. Also it does not have Gorilla glass (also BAD, and now you can see where this is going).
So A. is learning to ride his bike and yesterday he ran his bike into me because he thought it was funny, and remember how this phone is a bit longer than my last phone? It was sticking a bit out of my pocket because I hadn't yet figured out how to jam it in properly (because it isn't as wide, it does fit in my pocket if I rotate it a bit, I just haven't got in the habit of doing that yet) and it fell on the concrete and the screen broke.
I had bought insurance because I was worried about the speaker (which so far has been fine), and the insurance said, why not get it fixed locally? OK, and I picked a store, and now I have a voucher for it, but I was told today that their supplier doesn't have any screens and it might be a month until they do. If everything doesn't close back up again, of course.
I'm trying to see if another repair store has a screen in stock (though I don't know if I'll be able to change the insurance at this point... I should have checked whether they had a screen in stock before filing the claim, argh, but I didn't even know I needed to do that, though in retrospect it seems obvious), but basically now I'm in the same situation I was at the beginning of the month: with a cell phone that is only half functional, in the middle of a pandemic. *sigh*
(By which I mean: the phone still works, and the guy at the store said he thought it would probably be fine until it could be fixed if I were gentle with it and didn't drop it again, but trying to be super gentle with it kind of makes the whole "portable" part of a phone thing less of a thing. A's penance for breaking it (I suppose it's only half his fault) is that he can't text his dad on it until it gets fixed.)
IDK, I guess I can always go back to my S5 if I have to, which is not ideal but the thing does work. I'll have to factory reset it to fix the problems it's currently having, but I may have to anyway because if I don't use it as a phone the kids have decided they'd like to use it as a camera. I'm also wondering if I should just buy another phone, argh. I wouldn't even think about this if it weren't for pandemic and my thinking there is at least a chance that everything is going to close down again when cases rise even more in another week or two, but there we are.
eglantier, if OnePlus ever makes a smaller phone that is compatible with Verizon I will be right there so fast).Good but at the time annoying thing about this phone: twelve hours after I bought it from Amazon, Google helpfully sent me an article ("since you've been thinking about a Pixel!") telling me the price went down by about $100. Amazon no longer does price matches. While I was considering this, they also ran out of stock. Also apparently I have strong feelings about not rewarding Amazon for no longer doing price matching. So I returned the one from Amazon and bought from Walmart.com. It was a very smooth transaction.
I had expected Verizon to be the most irritating part of this whole process, but it turned out to be the easiest. Well, it wouldn't let me get a sim card online without changing my phone number (??) but I made a local appointment online, told them what I wanted, they were like, that's totally simple, and went to the store. The guy quite sensibly refused to touch my phone but that was OK because all I needed was the sim card (and for him to open my sim card tray, because I'd forgotten to bring the tool). It all went very smoothly.
Good things about this phone: the camera is, as promised, very good. And there are apps for manual control of the camera! It doesn't have the Samsung bloatware apps which makes me happy every time I look at my apps and I don't have to look at a bunch of things like NFL App and Flipbook and things that I just have no need for. In general it is kind of crazy to have a phone that actually... works... and doesn't lag everything because it's running out of memory... and in general living in 2019/2020 instead of 2014.I was also concerned about the battery life, but it turns out to be a lot better than my old S5, so that's good too. The rapid charging is pretty great. The fingerprint sensor took me about half a day to get used to and now I am hooked on it.
Bad things about this phone: Google already knows everything about me, not sure I want it to know even more. Although it is less wide than my old phone (good), it is slightly longer (BAD, and with bad repercussions, as you will see). It's good I didn't get a phone that was any longer, I guess. Also it does not have Gorilla glass (also BAD, and now you can see where this is going).
So A. is learning to ride his bike and yesterday he ran his bike into me because he thought it was funny, and remember how this phone is a bit longer than my last phone? It was sticking a bit out of my pocket because I hadn't yet figured out how to jam it in properly (because it isn't as wide, it does fit in my pocket if I rotate it a bit, I just haven't got in the habit of doing that yet) and it fell on the concrete and the screen broke.
I had bought insurance because I was worried about the speaker (which so far has been fine), and the insurance said, why not get it fixed locally? OK, and I picked a store, and now I have a voucher for it, but I was told today that their supplier doesn't have any screens and it might be a month until they do. If everything doesn't close back up again, of course.
I'm trying to see if another repair store has a screen in stock (though I don't know if I'll be able to change the insurance at this point... I should have checked whether they had a screen in stock before filing the claim, argh, but I didn't even know I needed to do that, though in retrospect it seems obvious), but basically now I'm in the same situation I was at the beginning of the month: with a cell phone that is only half functional, in the middle of a pandemic. *sigh*
(By which I mean: the phone still works, and the guy at the store said he thought it would probably be fine until it could be fixed if I were gentle with it and didn't drop it again, but trying to be super gentle with it kind of makes the whole "portable" part of a phone thing less of a thing. A's penance for breaking it (I suppose it's only half his fault) is that he can't text his dad on it until it gets fixed.)
IDK, I guess I can always go back to my S5 if I have to, which is not ideal but the thing does work. I'll have to factory reset it to fix the problems it's currently having, but I may have to anyway because if I don't use it as a phone the kids have decided they'd like to use it as a camera. I'm also wondering if I should just buy another phone, argh. I wouldn't even think about this if it weren't for pandemic and my thinking there is at least a chance that everything is going to close down again when cases rise even more in another week or two, but there we are.
