Everyone gets a new phone! We purchased two new Galaxy S9+ phones this week

Let’s talk about irony. Irony laced with suspicion. Let’s also talk about the state of phones in the Ipe household.

It’s been 2 years and 2 months since we purchased our dueling Galaxy S7 phones back in March 2016 during a trip to Philadelphia. Our phones have survived drops, a Jamaican waterfall, trips, the beach. Namita’s phone took an accidental float at the beach last August, and something bad happened to her micro USB charging port. It wouldn’t charge so she stuck it out with wireless charging until January 2018 when she bought a low-cost Samsung J7 phone. It’s cheap but slow and no bells and whistles. You can live without bells and whistles and undercarriage rust protection, but slow is annoying. She had to pay off the old phone as well.

My phone was doing great – can you believe it? Sure I needed to charge it often throughout the day, but no cracks or scratches. I made my final payment in April 2018. Finally! Phone is paid up and we can have a lower bill. Come May 1st, I am troubled to find my phone isn’t charging as fast as it used to. I can plug it in, but the rate of recharging has slowed to a crawl. My battery would run down quickly but I’ve learned to keep it topped off with wall chargers or the Anker portable charger. But now, I could keep it plugged in, it is barely charging, and my battery is still running down quickly. I read somewhere that rechargeable batteries such as the ones found in cell phones are good for approximately 500 charges. After that, you’re likely to see deteriorating performance.

As we technologists like to say…. “Oh crap.”

On Wednesday May 2nd, while I was in the midst of my quandary, I learned that Samsung & Verizon were running a promotion for $300 off the cost of the 64 GB Galaxy S9+. It was probably because Samsung was taking preorders for new models with 128 GB and 256 GB internal storage capacity. I had an S7 with 32 GB RAM and a 64 GB microSD card. I could live without those newer models.

The promotion was to end Wednesday May 2nd!

After talking it over, Nums and I met up at a specific Verizon Wireless store, and we bought two new S9+ phones — black for me and “Lilac” for her.

I won’t post all of the technical specs here. So far, I like the faster processing speed, and the biometrics like iris scanning and improved fingerprint reader. The larger screen is also nice but holding it takes some getting used to. I’m stil having some trouble with typing accurately with this Invisible Shield screen protector.

This entry was posted in Technology and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *