Loved to Hate that Phone

The mobile phone that I’ve had for the past couple years has never worked very well. The research I’d done, both online and with people I knew that owned said phone, indicated that it was a solid model phone. I always had issues with mine. The original phone I received got stuck in a loop rebooting about nine months after I bought it. The warranty replaced it and the replacement worked okay for a month or two until it started to flake out in the same way the first phone had done. As it continued to function well enough to use, I decided to put off replacing it until my service contract ran out. I’m also willing to be nice and argue that the model phone may have been good at one point and I lucked into getting a few crummy items from near the end of the production run. It could happen.

Sunday night the screen went dead on the phone. This was nice as it prevented me from seeing text messages or my phone book or seeing what buttons I’d hit on the phone, you know, all those things that make a phone really functional. Had I received a call, I could still answer it but I didn’t receive any. Monday night I stopped in the AT&T store nearest the house and picked out a new phone. As part of the swap-over, they were able to transfer my contacts from the old phone to the new phone. This pleased me.

When I got home I realized that they had only been able to swap my numbers from the SIM of my old phone. All the numbers I called the most were saved on my actual phone, you know, the one with the broken display. This was a problem.

A-ha! In the months soon after getting the now-broken phone, I’d gotten a copy of the mobile tools application from an intern friend of mine. While cleaning up the night before, I’d seen the cable I’d need to connect the phone to my computer. After a few minutes of searching, I found the cable, found the application, reinstalled it to a computer, attached the phone, downloaded the drivers for the modem in the mobile device and opened my phonebook. Bam! There everything was laid out before me. There may have been an easier way to do it but, since the phonebook in the new phone is laid out slightly differently than the old phone, I just reentered all the data by hand.

There’s a moment of panic when you lose your phonebook. Events years in the past had conspired to save me in a moment of crisis. Hooray the past!