Unlike most things I post here and elsewhere, this post is not interesting, informative, or funny. Ok, well maybe a little funny. I just wanted to tell some friends without repeating myself ten times and without the 420 character restriction of evil facebook.
So, last week my mom's phone broke. No clue how or why. She started complaining and naturally came to me to fix it (like I can fix anything lmao not). The 3g emblem kept flashing from 3g to 3g+ to 3 to E to 3g again. And the signal strength was grayed out. Being the electronic genius I am I knew exactly what to do, I called AT&T and asked them what it meant! lol They had me run some tests and check some stuff on the phone, most of which I think was just to make me feel like they were actually doing something. The end result was the phone was broke.
Anyhow, regardless of whatever had happened to the old phone they let us know that we were both eligible for new phone upgrades (since we're on a family plan together with land line and cels and stuff cause it's cheaper). So, at this point I was thinking oh wow and oh no at the same time. My mom and I had the exact same phones, Samsung a707. Apparently these were like the original 3g phones from Samsung. Have had them about three and a half years. They weren't smart phones, more like retarded phones. Nothing could be put on standby or suspended. If you got a call you would have to quit and loose all info connected to whatever you were doing if you wanted to answer it. They only had a number pad where you have to hit the "1" key like 8x to get an "@" symbol. Yeah, old, point made.
So, part of me got excited cause I was eligible for a new phone. I was thinking, "ooh new electronics" and the techno geek in my was all giddy. However, I had 58 games at $5-$7 each on the phone... Sure I get to keep them on THAT phone, which I wouldn't be carrying with me making the whole point of having them pointless. That's like $290-$406 plus over a dozen wallpapers and about a dozen ringtones and a couple apps. I figure that's about $500 worth of crap I was gonna loose. Well, AT&T said they would credit some back after we got new phones though, so I figured best to go for it and see what happens.
So began the three day nightmare of trying to find and choose new phones. My mom who refuses to buy such things online decided we were going to go "shopping". More like a treasure hunt or something. In three days we went to Best Buy, 10 AT&T stores between Dade and Broward Counties, 6 or 7 Radio Shacks, 3 Walmarts, and 1 Target (they suck). Finally ended up making purchase at the AT&T store in the Pembroke Lakes Mall. If you've been keeping up with my status on facebook you know this is where the guy informed me that he, "liked my choice of widgets" lmao I'm still rofl about that one.
Final deal basically amounted to this, for $50 I got the Samsung Mythic a897 with ac adapter, free car adapter, free screen protectors, free case, my mom got the Samsung Impression a877 with ac adapter, free car adapter, free screen protectors, free case, and they credited the AT&T account $129 towards replacing games and apps and stuff and of course still got to keep old phone with all the games and crap anyhow. So basically they paid us $79 to take these 2 expensive phones and all these accessories. I'm still not sure how this deal ended up that good. I guess maybe cause my mom has had that AT&T account since 1960 something.
Sadly, most, in fact nearly all games, apps, wallpapers, and ringtones I had seem to not be available anymore or are not compatible with this phone to redownload. However I got some new ones, starting of course with the 3 classics, my personal favorites which I own about a dozen versions of each, Risk, Monopoly, and Scrabble, the 3 games no one ever beats me at, ever, never ever ever! I will pwn anyone who's up to the challenge in any of those 3 games anytime anyplace! Ok, enough of that, moving on...
Have spent the last week now trying to fix address book, calendar, etc. Stupid SIM card really only copies names and like two phone numbers and 1 email address. No land addresses, notes, bdays, etc. were saved. And it stuck everyone's names, first middle last nickname all into the first name field. So lotta work there between my phone and my mom's since she can't do crap on her own.
Trying to help my mom pick out and understand cel phones is a lot like trying to teach a turtle how to plot space shuttle trajectories and calculate launch windows.
And finally, here it is, the phone I got...
Samsung Mythic a897
Big features imo would be it has 3 main screens you can switch between by sliding left and right instead of the usual one screen. It's camera has a flash (if I didn't already have an uber Konica Minolta digital camera this would matter more). It has mobile tv and 4 stations are free (abc, cbs, nbc, & fox). It has voice dialing (that refuses to dial who I tell it to! lol). It has a nifty social media app that logs you into facebook, twitter, and myspace all at once and puts the streams from all 3 into one which is kinda cute, of course who still uses myspace... It has touch screen and motion detection and vibration. So you can turn it sideways and it switches from portrait to landscape mode automatically. It has full QWERTY keyboard on touch screen. It has a higher resolution screen than most other cel phones on the market right now. It has an absurd amount of features and apps (most of which I'll likely never use). The menu alone has 5 pages with 12 items on each page and that's not even everything it can can do. And it doesn't seem to eat the battery like my old phone did. Had this on standby now for over 4 days, plus used it a few times and watched 3 episodes of Bones and 2 episodes of NCIS and some Letterman and it still shows full charge. My old phone ate batteries like Pac-Man on dots.
Ok, done rambling, just wanted to mention somewhere that I got nifty new phone. Yay me!
