Loss of phone 📱, lot trouble 😒

Last week I went on holiday during Easter. The holiday was nice, except on last day I accidentally dropped my phone, falling screen face down on gravel roads and the rocky gravels hit my phone and cracked the actual screen like spider web!

Accidents can happen. I did have a screen protector but sharp gravels hit within millimeter thin areas between protector and bezel and cracked the screen.

I thought at worst it would few hundred quids to replace a phone. But it was just start of my trouble!

The phone was still operative though. I could still swipe on screen and apps were working fine. However, I could feel tiny glass particles hitting my fingers. So, I decided to buy a new phone as soon as possible.

Phone market is a mine field. There are just too many of them. Mine was an Android phone. I briefly thought of moving to iPhone but then realized many of my apps are Android only. While I could possibly find their iOS equivalents but it would take me weeks if not longer for doing R&D. So I decided to buy another Android phone.

As I was on holiday I did not have access to computer so I tried to research on broken phone, which was not ideal. But nevertheless, I managed to shortlist 3–4 phones, which seemed similar to my current (broken) phone. The only thing my phone lacked was eSIM compatibility so this was only feature I wanted in my new phone.

I am skint, so didn’t want to spend a fortune on new phone. Unfortunately my shortlisted phones were not available in any nearby shop (Argos, Tesco, John Lewis, Currys etc.). Even Amazon was showing few days of lead time!

On next day, on my drive towards home, I stopped at a town when I found an Argos. My wife wanted to shop elsewhere, so dropped her 10 minute drive away and went to Argos to look for a phone.

Luckily, I found a phone with features I wanted. The camera had less megapixels over my broken phone but I use real camera during holidays, so it was not a problem for me. I also lost the head phone jack but I rarely use wired headphone nowadays. So, I went ahead and bought the phone.

Excited with the new phone, I sat in my car and quickly transferred the SIM from old phone to new phone. This was the first place where I stumbled upon a problem. Just before shuffling the SIM card, my wife called me to inform she had done with shopping and I can pick her up.

When I started the new phone with SIM card inside, the phone greeted me to log in with Google account. I logged in but Google wanted to make sure it was really me, so it sent a code to my old phone. There was no WiFi and my old phone had no internet. So, I could not receive any code. I frantically searched for an alternate way and Google asked me to navigate thru some nested menu in old phone saying there I’d find a code which would work. Hey, I did find that code but it did not work!

So, I had a new phone but it was unusable. I could not make any phone calls. Of course, I could have swapped the SIM back into old phone but I was just thinking if there is any other way. By this time my wife rang me and I was able to accept the incoming call. I told her I’m coming. So I drove for 10 minute without a working phone. I parked the car in retail park and could not figure out in which shop she was as nobody was standing outside of typical shops where she goes. After few minutes my wife rang me again, with some expletives for making her wait so long. But anyway, finally we were united (with my wife, not with the phone — yet).

We were supposed to visit a friend’s house nearby. I thought at least I’d get WiFi which will rescue me on setting up the new phone. But my wife was not happy as she declared it would be unsocial to spend time in setting up my phone rather than socializing. After some brief argument on friend’s driveway (!) I managed to convince my wife it would not take long.

Finally, I entered my friend’s house who welcomed me and happily asked me to connect to his WiFi when I explained him my plight. He said he recently got internet from Virgin after having lot of trouble with Sky. OK, not my problem, I thought so asked him WiFi details. Oddly, he gave me an SSID which looked like SKYxxxxx. That’s strange, how come it says Sky when he got Virgin. My friend explained, in order to avoid re-connecting with so many devices, including some hard to connect smart home devices, he rather preferred to change his SSID from Virgin to Sky. Wow, what a clever guy.

Any, to cut long story short, once I connected my broken phone to WiFi, I could easily set up my new phone with Google account and it sprang to life without additional drama.

I then thought at least I should set up communication apps like WhatsApp, Telegram etc. So installed WhatsApp and it removed all my previous messages. OK, no something to cry about as I don’t keep important stuff in WhatsApp. But what irritated me that all my settings of which conversations I kept mute that settings were gone! Every chat in WhatsApp (and I had hundreds) which I was part of in last 10 years were all active. Thing which moved in archive also came back to life in main WhatsApp list. What a farce! As soon as I installed WhatsApp my phone started ringing like Christmas church bells. I had no choice but to silence all WhatsApp notifications. What a great relief.

Telegram, in contrast, was much more professional. It offered me to send a message to old phone or an SMS. So, connecting in new phone was flawless. Since it stores messages in its server, I got all my old messages back. All my settings were inherited in my new phone. Wonder why Telegram is not more popular than WhatsApp!

My wife asked me to take photos of her with friends. Usually I resent taking photos but this was the first time I was glad as I wanted to test the phone and see how good photos are. My friends smirked as they could see one benefit of new phone finally.

Well, life still not smooth yet.

When I set up Gmail, I started getting pings on every email received. Somehow Gmail did not inherit my notification settings and I had to manually silence it and instead of automatic pushing of emails, I had to change it to pull on demand.

When I tried to call someone from car, I realized it is not connected to car’s Bluetooth. So I had to stop somewhere and make it connect. The connection was easy though.

After coming home I discovered I can’t connect to any of the smart devices, like IP cameras, smart plugs, Alexa etc. So had to install all those apps again. One good thing was that all apps which I had username and password (for cloud storage) were easy to re-connect. The IP camera etc. need to be re-configured only if WiFi changes. Not a big hassle if phone changes. Now I could realize why my friend changed his SSID instead. It was one change which avoid multiple changes elsewhere!

I still have not managed to install all banking apps. Two of the banks are app only and they want me to take photos of driving license, passport and take a short video of myself reciting my name while looking at phone. Holy cow. Every time I change phone I need to go thru this process again. Better not have a bank account which is app only.

I had few notes in Google Keep and OneNote. They all came back once I synced with Google and Microsoft.

I had some authenticator apps for logging into different applications in office. I still don’t know if there is an easy to set up in new phone. I am still having to use my broken phone for logging to those systems.

I simply don’t know how many days it will take me to set up my new phone as of my old phone. I reckon few weeks if not longer.

Since my old phone is still operational, I am able to export some apps’ data and import in new phone. This saved me from lengthy re-keying data in new phone. If my old phone was lost or non-operational it would have been lot harder to carry on with life.

During this process I realized how much we are integrated with our phones. Imagine I were travelling to airport and my phone broke with boarding cards inside the phone. Many airlines would require me to pay a hefty fee to print boarding pass at airport.

Some people pay via NFC using Google/Apple wallet. Fortunately I don’t use NFC. But if phone breaks during travel, it may end up someone stuck away from home for hours. Many ticket machines no longer accept cash. Sometimes people don’t carry alternate payment methods like physical debit/credit cards as their phones act as debit/credit card.

Some cars (like Tesla) require phone as keys. So no phone means no transport!

My car also has a companion app. But at least without the app the car still runs. I no longer carry physical store cards like Clubcard. In Tesco many items have lower prices for Clubcards. So if no Clubcard (which is stored inside phone) it means paying more for grocery shopping!

I often read in newspapers that old people without smart phones are struggling to pay because many places like car parking machines do not accept coins and one must pay by app. BTW, if you don’t like paying for parking, use www.freeparkingspace.co.uk website.

I used to think who in modern days live without phones. But it did not occur to me that even those with phones can be without phones temporarily. So there must be ways to carry on with our lives when not having the phone with us.

But loss of my phone made me realize our phones are us. Our phones have become our identities. Without phone I can’t prove it is really me.

This is a list of where we are using our phones nowadays. Your mileage may vary.

• Call
• Message
• Email
• Navigation
• Banking
• Payment
• Airline boarding pass
• Identity via scanned documents
• Access files in cloud storage
• Calculator
• Watch
• Expense track
• Office log in authenticator
• One Time Passwords for log in
• Notes
• Web browsing, internet
• Video watching
• Camera
• Calendar, appointment
• Smart home devices

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