Jumping up the Tech Ladder: A New Phone!

This week I got a new phone.

I've had a cell phone for over a decade now, so the novelty has worn off a bit and I like to think I've gotten over the urge to upgrade to the latest and greatest every two years. I've had the same model of phone, the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, for four years now, and I'd have happily gone on using it if it weren't for a fairly serious issue with it that prompted me to finally get a new phone.

Although not as headline-making as its brother the Note 7's exploding battery problem, the Note 4 has a very aggravating issue where over time the battery degrades and cause the phone to randomly enter an eternal rebooting loop, from which the only way to recover is to plug it into a charger. At first it would happen on very low battery charge, but over time it would start to happen at higher and higher battery percentages.

How do I know it's the battery? Well, I've actually had two different Note 4s over the past four years. After two years the problem had gotten so bad with the first one that I got my phone replaced with another one (the month after I got laid off at the JCMT, actually). When the new one arrived, I switched batteries between the two phones on a whim and the new one immediately began displaying the same issue (it'd gotten so bad that it was triggering with over 90% battery charge) while the old phone with the new battery was fine.

Well, I went through with the phone swap and things were fine for maybe half a year or so, before I started noticing my new Note 4 beginning to exhibit the exact same behavior. By this time I was starting to begin the process of applying to Swinburne and working at the YTLA, so I was busy, distracted, generally never far enough from a charger for it to be a big issue, and not particularly flush with cash, so getting a new phone never really made it to the pile of things to worry about.

The problem hasn't gone away, however, and having moved to a new city having a reliable phone to help me navigate has become a lot more important. Once I'd worked out the route between the university and home it wasn't too much of a problem in my phone died on the train, but if I want to head out somewhere new I really don't want my phone conking out on me while I'm on an unfamiliar bus for the first time.

The long and short of it is, this week I pre-ordered the Samsung Galaxy S9+ and picked it up yesterday, a few days before it officially goes on sale in the stores. I note this merely because this is probably the one time in my life that I'll ever pre-order a phone and have such early access; I wasn't actually in that big of a hurry that I couldn't have waited to pick one up in-store this weekend, but Samsung had a promotion going on whereby pre-ordering netted you a free wireless charger, and I had just been musing about checking out wireless charging for the first time a few days earlier.

Having gone four years without a phone upgrade I've jumped several iterations and the S9+ feels quite new and alien. I've had a phone from the Note series for the past six years or so (two Note 4s, and a Note 2 before that) primarily for their large screen sizes, back when the Note line had the largest screens you could find in a cell phone. After looking at the current generation of phones however I realized that there was hardly a noticeable difference in screen sizes any more with the S+ phones, and it's not like I actually used the Notes' stylus (their other differentiating feature) enough to justify their higher cost.

With the S9+ I've also made the jump from physical capacitive buttons on the phone to purely software buttons on the screen. I'd been somewhat worried about this for a few years now and finally decided to take the plunge as it was clear that physical buttons on Android phones were fast becoming extinct. Yet after just a single day of using my phone I can say that it hasn't been nearly as disruptive as I'd feared—in fact, I barely notice the difference.

I think I'll call it…a “landline.”

This is also the first phone I've had with a USB Type-C connector, and it's quite nice for plugging in a cable. I also discovered partly by accident that by using a USB Type-C-to-Ethernet converter I can actually connect to the Internet over an Ethernet cable! (As shown above.) I don't know when that'll ever come in useful, but it's pretty amusing nonetheless.

There are some other features of the S9+ that I'm looking forward to trying out as well; for one thing, it's supposed to have one of the best cameras of any phone out there. Actually, it has two cameras: a wide-angle one and a second telephoto one that gets switched to when zooming in, which should allow for better zoomed-in photos than are normally seen on phone cameras. (And the wide-angle lens can swap between two different apertures which should allow it to take better photos in low light.) It can shoot video at 4K (a capability I haven't had before), and has a super-slow-motion mode where it can shoot at 960 frames per second for short bursts—probably not something I'll use often, but it might be interesting to play around with.

Anyway, it's getting late and I should finish this up, so a hui hou!