I’ve written before about all my technological devices needing to be upgraded at the same time. And now in 2020, I am repeating the experience. I needed a new tablet earlier this year, and was fortunate to get it in February before the pandemic hit. My old tablet was still functional, but starting to have problems. When no one gave me a new tablet for Christmas, I bought myself a present.
Then, while we’ve been in lock-down, my husband and I both noticed issues surfacing with our original Google Pixel phones, which are now three and a half years old and no longer supported with Google upgrades. We did away with our landline during our move, so our cell phones are now our primary mode of communcation.
I took the plunge and ordered new phones for both of us. This is the first time I’ve ever bought a cell phone sight unseen, without trying it on for size. I wanted a relatively small phone (to fit my hands) and my husband wanted as little a learning curve as possible. I’d been reading that the Google Pixel 4a was coming, and I’d been waiting. The release date was delayed, but finally it was available for preorder. Early reviews were excellent. I ordered two of them through Amazon.
Why Amazon? The phone was available there before it was available through Verizon (our cell phone carrier). And I have Amazon Prime, so shipping would be free.
On the day it was supposed to be delivered, I signed on to Amazon’s “track package” feature in mid-morning. Already, the schedule showed only six stops until the phones would be delivered. A couple of minutes later, four stops.
Then two stops.
The next stop.
And by the time my laptop screen showed we were the next stop, I got a message with a picture of our front porch with a box on it. The phones were here!
I am the tech support in our family, so it was my responsibility to set up the phones. I decided to mess with my phone first, so I could experiment before disrupting my husband’s communication with the world.
I’d purchased cases and screen protectors a couple of weeks earlier. (How can companies produce cases and screen protectors for phones that haven’t been released yet?) The first thing I wanted to do was to put the cases and screen protectors on the phones. The cases were easy, but I am very bad at placing screen protectors on devices without bubbles. Smoothing out all the air pockets took a good thirty minutes or so for my phone.
The new phone signed onto our home wi-fi network easily, so while I was working on the bubbles, I transferred all my apps and data from my old phone to the new phone. Now I had a very nice wi-fi device, but no Verizon phone line.
It was time to tackle the SIM card.
No luck. I couldn’t get the old SIM card to fit in the new phone. SIM cards, for those of you who have never messed with them, are very small, seemingly flimsy electronic chips. I was reluctant to force anything, nor to take the card out of the bracket it fit in.
I tried the Verizon website. No real help there. Maybe I should have watched their video, but I was running out of patience.
So I repeated the de-bubbling and data/app transfer on my husband’s new phone, and vowed to take the phones to the Verizon store for help the next day.
Which I did. There is a new Verizon store near our home, and I walked in. Because of their COVID-19 prevention policies, I was told to leave my name and phone number and wait in my car. Which I did.
When it was my turn, I went inside and spoke to the sales representative, who didn’t really want to help me, because I’d bought the phones from Amazon. But I played “hapless older lady” and convinced him to try to swap out the SIM cards for me. Which he did. He was not afraid to take the flimsy SIM cards out of their brackets and insert them in the brackets in the new phones. He even left an unprotected SIM card on his table while he talked to another sales rep in the store.
After he finished, I thanked him profusely and promised that if I needed any accessories for the phones I would return to this store.
And now we have two new cell phones.
The Pixel 4a is quite like the earlier Pixel phones we had. The learning curve was short, and I’m pleased with how the phone works. It automatically connected with my car and with our home intercom via Bluetooth.
My husband was generally happy with the new phone also. But he had not had a PIN on his old phone, so every time he wanted to do something with the phone and it wanted his PIN, he asked me what to do. That got old pretty quickly, so I took the PIN off his phone. He’ll have to go commando.
I sense a laptop replacement in my future within the next year or so. My laptop battery is not holding a charge like it used to. I keep it charging through the power cord almost exclusively, and I don’t take it many places these days. I hope I can limp along for several more months. I want to break the cycle of replacing so many devices on the same three-year cycle.
What technological advances have you dealt with recently?
