A week ago we got another offer from T-Mobile to upgrade to the Samsung t319 for free if we signed a two year contract. We had been getting these periodically because our contract had expired in January. Since we’ve been with them for years now, signing another two year contract was no big deal. Everyone in Joe’s family has T-Mobile anyway, so it makes it easy to keep in touch without worrying about our plan minutes (we share a family plan with only 400 anytime minutes).
I inquired about the cost of upgrading both phones instead of the one and the rep said it would be $46 after a $39.99 rebate. Two new phones for $46 didn’t sound bad to me. I said “sign me up!” on Tuesday and surprisingly, our phones were delivered yesterday. Talk about fast! And to think they’d charge $15 if I wanted express shipping. What’s that; three hour shipping as opposed to three days?
In any case, we were really excited, but had to plug in the phones to charge first. Three hours later we were finally able to turn them on and explore. Let me tell you how annoyed I am that you cannot easily transfer your phonebook entries from one phone to another. Obviously I don’t upgrade often because I had just assumed that the wallpapers, ringtones, and phonebook entries were stored on the SIM card and would be available on the new phone. Wrong!
After a little research, I figured out how to take the entries on my old phone and save them to the SIM card, but it was a lengthy process as there’s no way to do them all at once. I had to copy them over one by one which was tedious. It was at that point it became clear who my real friends are because I was not about to go through this nonsense for someone who calls me once a year.
Not only that, but once I copied the entries from the SIM card into the new phone, I then had duplicate entries because the phonebook reads them off the SIM card and the phone simultaneously. I could delete just the SIM card entries, which is exactly what I did, but I still had a problem with the entries now stored on the phone: since they are designed to include several phone #s under one contact, you can assign different categories like Mobile, Home, Office, etc. to each unique number. Instead of retaining the number category from the old phone setup, the new phone just dumped all the numbers into the Mobile category since it’s the first one listed under each contact. And when you go into there, you can’t move the number to a different category either. So in other words, a huge waste of time. Why even bother having the ability to store stuff to the SIM card if when you load them into the new phone they don’t retain the information properly?
I ended up having to delete the entries from both the SIM card and phone and start all over. I put the SIM card back into the old phone, typed the entries into an Excel spreadsheet, then put it into the new phone and added the entries in manually. What a pita! I could understand if I was moving from a Motorola phone but I was upgrading from one Samsung to another. It really shouldn’t be that difficult.
I also learned that any ringtones or wallpaper I had downloaded on the old phone were now stuck in there. Luckily I am cheap and had only downloaded one of each. I ended up spending over an hour at T-Mobile’s site trying to find a new ringtone since the ones that come with the phone could not be more awful if they tried. Whatever happened to actual rings? Am I the only person who doesn’t need a song for my ringtone? But since I had no other choice, I looked through the songs. Against the advice of my friend, who was on AIM pleading with me not to do it, I just downloaded my old ringtone – Just Like Heaven by The Cure. I just couldn’t find anything else worth buying. I am a creature of habit. As for the wallpaper, I really couldn’t make up my mind. Since the new phone has a camera, I took a picture of a Cure single (Friday I’m In Love) and made that my new wallpaper.
I kind of feel duped; like when people upgrade their blogging software and realize their older version was just as good. Other than the fact that this new phone has a flip design and I don’t have to worry about locking the keys, there’s really nothing impressive about it. Sure, the camera is cute, but the picture quality is crap like most cellphone cameras, and I’m too cheap to pay for their internet add-on just to send the photos to Flickr. To think the phone retails for $150! I’d never pay that in a million years.