Phone Fun...

I've only had a few phones in my lifetime. The first was a very cheap basic flip phone with less features then my Palm Zire 31. It was a tank of a phone and lasted me a few years until the third time I forgot it on my car's roof. Thankfully I've not done that ever sense.

My second phone was a short lived second hand unit from my brother. He'd upgraded to the HTC G1(Hero) and gave me his old flip phone. It had a micro SD slot and could play video which was cool, but there was a reason he upgraded other then wanting the newest phone for himself. The battery life sucked hard.

A few months on from that I finally came out of my contract and with my brother's help (At the time he worked for T-Mobile in a call center in the Retention Department) I got my first Nice phone. I say nice because it was nice, but it also was the most basic cheap nice there was. I couldn't afford anything like a G1 or iPhone so I picked out a Blackberry Pearl Flip.

That phone was so slow it hurt. It had the newest version of BB OS, but had a generation older Chipset. The Curve my sister in law had at the same version of the OS but it ran way better. Even with the slow OS it was the best phone on offer and I fell in love with its keyboard. If you haven't seen a Pearl Flip, it used a five wide keyboard with functions on either side of the number pad. As part of this layout they gave each key two letters in the QWERTY layout making the phone a compromise in function without a really keyboard but with the layout. I got so good with that keyboard layout that I turned off autocomplete and just used double tapping to text. 

That phone lasted me a good while. I didn't see much reason to change it until I got a new job and had the money to look at a upgrade. Looking around I found a deal with Sprint to get a full Unlimited Plan with a Samsung Galaxy S2 Epic 4G Touch. Yes they branded the GS2 as the Epic 4G Touch which was dumb, but it was also a massive step up from the palm pilot.

I still have that phone and use it with my car's ODB2 Bluetooth Dongle to get some cool info in how my car's working. Back when it was my primary phone though it wasn't all perfect. The Epic 4G wasn't LTE. At that time Sprint had merged with Clear and focused on using the WiMax system running on 2.4Ghz band for high speed Data. I could get 16Mbps but the high band meant I had to be in line of site of a tower to get it.

Thankfully I found the world of Rooting and was able to download a Stock Rooted version of android for my phone. With it I was able to alter the WiMax Modem settings to make it connect with a lower signal and improve the power management. I was happy with the phone for the most part as it was by far the nicest phone I'd ever had. Samsung even rolled out a version of Android 4 aka Ice-cream Sandwich near the end of its life that updated the TouchWiz Interface a lot.

To be honest the only real drawbacks with that phone had to be the Screen and battery life. After the ICS update the S2 started sucking down battery like it was nothing and even after a patch to fix it it was no good for my daily driver. I started looking at my options and with my contract coming to an end I had a few good options. I wasn't as crunched for cash as I had been in the past I wasn't looking for the best value so much as the best deal on the best phone.

When I got my S2 it was discounted because the S3 had come out and was the hot new model. A year and a half on from then the S4 had come out and the S5 was only a few months out. This fact meant the S4, at the time still the top of Samsung's model on offer I found a deal at BestBuy for a 16GB S4 on a renewed contract for $50 + Line Transfer fee. I was so hyped at getting a new phone that I combined getting it with a Magic the Gathering Pre Release event that weekend.

I placed the order for the phone at the local BestBuy for Saturday, the day my contract came up for renewal, then pulled an all niter at the local card shop for the pre release event. From there I went to WalMart and got a new case for my new phone and then to BestBuy where I napped in the parking lot until they opened. Again this was a big thni gfor me as I was getting the best phone I could for the first time. I got the phone and drove to work napping again before I had to start a full 8 hour shift.

The sleep I lost was made up for in the fact that the S4 had everything the S2 didn't and then some. The Sprint version packed a Samsung Exynos SOC just as the S2 from Sprint giving it a bit more raw power then the QualComm SnapDragon based models but with fewer LTE bands supported. Even with the fewer LTE bands the signal was far better and the data over LTE vs that over WiMax was more then double. In a memorable case I was visiting my girlfriend in California and was able to download the HD version of The Avengers: Age of Ultran from Google Play in a matter of minutes while at a mall with her.

In any case I found no draw backs to my picking the S4 when I did. Even when I found out the reason for the deal being so good was a new Tri Band Modem model with faster LTE being shipped ahead of the S5's launch I still loved the phone. I was able to Root it just as I'd done with my S2 before and by moving my 32GB SD card over I had enough room for all my stuff on the 16GB model I'd gotten.

By the time my plan was up for renewal again i'd found no flaws with my S4 and to be honest I didn't have much of a reason to upgrade. The only things that stood out with the S4 as needing improvement in my book and others was the screen. OLED Displays are lit by the Pixels themselves and don't have back-lights. Making each pixel color correct, bright and long lasting is a challenge that Samsung and others hadn't cracked as of the S4.

Enter the S6 and S6 Edge. My co-worker at the time had upgraded from his HTC One M7 to the S6 giving me a chance to see the phone in person. The screen was so much nicer, the build of the phone itself felt way better, and to be honest it juts looked sexy. The only draw back I could see was the fact I was going to have to give up my 32GB SD Card, but as long as I got a model with 32GB or more of storage on it didn't really matter all that much.

I started looking at the options and around 12:30am, the Sunday my plan came up for renewal I chanced a look on BestBuy's website. They had an offer that I didn't think could be real. A 32GB S6 Edge with a contract renewal for $1 plus the line change x-fer fee of $25 and a $100 BestBuy GiftCard. In other words the phone would cost me -$74. The only catch was the deal was only for the Edge and that the only stores that had the deal happened to be in Portland. I placed my order and after about 6 hours of sleep I drove the 2 hours up I-5 and I-205 to get my sick new phone.

After some bouncing around at the support desk trying to get my phone Activated and the line transferred by myself I went to my car and sat in the parking lot downloading the Samsung app to transfer my phone settings and stuff from my S4 to my new S6 on the S6 then sending the APK to my S4 so I could install it and do the X-fer. After I figured that all out I found that happily everything I had including the music on my SD card had been copied over.

Just as I'd done with my S2 and S4 before I Rooted my phone, this time though I kicked myself because one of the cool new features of this phone was broken forever the moment I did the rooting. Rooting my phone tripped Samsung's Knox, a TPM unit that once tripped can't be reset. Without it I can't use Samsung Pay. The idea of just holding my phone out to any card reader to pay for things sounded really cool, but it's not going to happen so dang it all. Google Pay does work, but it's NFC based and doesn't work with my Credit and Debit card.

With the $100 gift card I got with the phone I ordered a pair of Qi Chargers and a new phone case. Now I just set my phone down to charge.

Well that's my phone history in a nut shell... I could go on but this is long enough.