New Samsung Galaxy Phone

Samsung Galaxy A03s
Showing both back and front

My phone died last week. I thought it was the battery so I bought a new one from Amazon for ten bucks. Then it really died. So I ordered a refurbished phone from Tracphone. I think it cost me $40. What a joyful experience.

USB Connectors
Click to embiggenate

Unlike Amazon they want $5 for overnight shipping but me being a cheapskate I told myself I can live for three days without my phone. Showed up yesterday and it needs to be activated and charged. Charging is going to take a while so let's get that started. Old charging cable doesn't work. New charging cable uses USB-c connectors on both ends. Root through my box of USB cables and they are all the old style, no new ones. Do I have anything that uses this new style connector? Hmm, how about the DOSS speaker? Ah ha! It does! Plug it in and it starts charging. Cool. Took like 12 hours to fully charge it up, but at least it works.

USB cable with C connector on one end and an A connector on the other

Check with my wife, she has all kinds of new fangled do-dads, does she have an extra cable? She does, but not of the correct flavor, so off to Amazon. I find a cable for $5. There goes the $5 I saved on shipping. I'm not going to get fast charging, but that's okay. I turn my phone off when I go to bed and plug in the charger cable, and since I'm not on my phone all friggin' day long like some people are, I should be fine.

Now for the activation. What fun. I dial up the website on my computer and click on Activate and it wants to send me a text message. That's not going to work, my old phone is dead as a doornail. No other option but the chat line, so I spend 10 or 15 minutes chatting (send a line, go play solitaire while waiting for a response, repeat) and eventually he tells me I have to find another phone and call some number. Borrow my wife's phone and call and I get a robocop who offers me options, none of which are helpful. So I start asking for an operator.

What word do you use to refer to a human? Real person? Operator? My wife says I should use 'representative', but I persisted in using 'operator' and eventually the robocop connected me to a real person. Makes me wonder how many words the robocop is able to recognize, or maybe it just gives up after a certain number of failed repetitions.

Anyway, I get connected to a real person who seems to have a handle on English, not perfect, but workable and we're going through the rigamarole of me proving I am me and he asks me for my phone's email. This flummoxed me. My phone is dead, and my phone doesn't have an email address, it has a phone number. What is he talking about? Eventually I realized he was asking about the email address connected to my Tracfone account. He sent me an email and I was able to confirm my existence and he turned on my phone.

Now we have to make sure my new phone works, so he asks me to make a phone call. That's a problem because I don't know anybody's phone numbers. So off to Google Contacts on my computer and look up some numbers, but all I get is voice mail. Everybody's busy. A couple minutes later somebody calls back, wants to know why I'm bothering them while they are at work. Tell him I'm testing my new phone. So I can make and receive phone calls. At least to one person.

Now the operator / representative / real person wants to know if I can get data. That means either audio or video, so let's pull up YouTube. Of course, everything on this phone is slightly different. It's got all the same stuff, but it's all in new places and everything works slightly differently, but eventually I get there and I've got a video playing so I think we're good.

My main uses for my phone are phone calls, text messages, and Google Maps, and those all seem to work. Since I have started using a smartphone I have found a couple other things that are useful:

• YouTube Music
• Bluetooth
• Voice to text
• Wifi

YouTube Music is not something you just use, seems you have to install the program (app in newspeak). Wandered around for a while looking for it but eventually found it and it and we're good. I haven't tried Bluetooth or Wifi yet. I'll get to it.

Voice to text works, though there is a new feature that evidently allows you to send voice recordings via the text messaging system. Some people thrive on noise, I ain't one of 'em. To get to Voice to text you have to tap on the OTHER microphone icon. It works, but when I say 'question mark' it puts in the the words 'question mark' in the message. My old phone but the question mark symbol (?). Bah, double bah and humbug. Now I gotta figure out how to change that.

Poking around on the net (using MY COMPUTER, I don't use my phone for anything except the bare essentials) I found this page:

Voice-to-text service selection

Bigger versions of the last two screens:

Changed to Google Voice Typing and now I can insert punctuation by naming the character.

Still haven't tried the camera.