Saying Goodbye to an Old Friend

I recently had to replace a cell phone and was unpleasantly surprised at how stressful that process can be. I was unprepared for the amount of work involved, as well as how much I stood to lose in making the switch. Don't get me wrong - I would be the first to defend cell phones as one of the most useful gadgets available, but I think they have a long way to go to integrate smoothly into our lives. In this article I will share the effort and pain entailed in moving to a replacement phone. I only hope that my experience helps others who are following in my digital footsteps.

With all the new features and services available in cell phones these days, it is no wonder that people are beginning to invest a significant amount of time and energy in their phone relationships, and I'm no exception. An unabashed early gadget adopter, I am not ashamed to admit that I willingly knocked over several small children to be the first in line for the first camera phone, and in no time had explored every menu and function available on my shiny new cellular wonder. And after a year and half of bonding with this device, it is safe to say that I had formed quite an attachment.

Now I won't bore you with the details of how many times I may or may not have dropped the original phone, but let's just say that I had gotten my fair share of mileage out of it. So, the time had come to replace the phone (in a separate article you can read all about how I was abused and mistreated during the whole phone replacement process).

When the replacement showed up, I immediately set aside some "Quality Gadget Time" to break in the new phone. It would have been fun to skim the manual again to see if I had forgotten any cool tricks, but what I really needed to do was get back into my cellular routine. What I thought was going to be an hours worth of transitioning work turned out to be a huge headache.

I started by migrating the contacts from one phone to the other. There are the obvious friends and family members that had to go, but I found myself re-evaluating the remaining entries in my phone's address book. At one time each of these were important enough for me to have captured their name and preserved them, but here was an opportunity to prune the list - not to mention save some cycles in entering the information on the new phone.

Pruning the Old Address Book

I didn't just blindly copy all the information from the old phone to the new. I spent a moment to consider each contact and whether I actually needed Great Aunt Sally's number in my new mobile phone. I moved the less convenient contacts to my computer so that I didn't permanently lose them. Of course, if you are trying to "lose a number" switching cell phones is a great excuse!

Some of you are no doubt wondering why I don't simply synchronize my phone with my computer where all my contacts permanently live. That is a great question, and one that will continue to confound me as well. Suffice to say that with all the bells and whistles

on my phone, the ability to sync with the one true source of information (namely my computer) is missing.

Kissing My Contact Photos Goodbye

One of the best reasons to have a camera phone is to attach a snapshot to your friends and family entries, and have their faces pop up on the screen when they call. One of the dirty little secrets they don't tell you is that once you assign a picture to a contact in your address book, it is stuck there and cannot be copied or moved to another phone! Bottom line is that I lost all the wonderful headshots in my phone's address book, and have to track down each person again and hope for another stunning photo opportunity.

Like many others, my phone lets me do more with my pictures than just attach them to my contact list. I can choose to share my snapshots with other picture phones or via the web. Alternatively, I can store my own set of pictures in a separate "picture wallet" on the phone. I have used this feature extensively keeping a mini photo album with me to remind me of all the places I had been and people I had seen. Unfortunately, that entire set of memories was lost since there was no way to pull these photos out of the picture wallet and off the phone.

All Downloaded Treats Are Gone, Too

You may be surprised how many ringtones, screensavers, and games a person can download in a years time, but given the number of "downtime" opportunities (e.g. doctor's offices, boring classrooms, commute to work on the train) maybe this shouldn't be so astonishing. These applications pile up over time and take up space in the limited memory available on your phone. In fact, you may have run into memory problems if you are a frequently downloader. What you may not know, however, is that most phones do not let you transfer applications between phones. So to re-create the same mobile phone experience on a new device, you have to seek out, download, and (worst of all) pay for all the same content again!

Configuring the new phone

So after you re-entered the contacts, snapped some new photos for your address book, and downloaded the latest John Mayer ringtone, you'd like to think that you are back in action. But there are still a slew of additional tweaks and modifications you are likely to make as you attempt to finish personalizing your phone. These include choosing a color scheme, setting up ring profiles (e.g. "loud" for outdoor use or "quiet" for meeting rooms), speed dial numbers, location-based services, and more.

The bottom line is this. More painful than underestimating the amount of work involved in moving to the new phone was being unprepared for the loss of personal content accumulated on the original phone. I am not sure whether there is any useful advice to give here since it can be very rewarding to invest time and energy into personalizing your phone, and integrating it into your life. Perhaps what I experienced will soon be commonplace among cell phone owners, and as familiar (or painful) as failing to get a strong signal, running out of battery power, or paying for roaming charges used to be.