Waking up at 01:00 Monday morning is a price you pay to watch (most) Formula 1 live in New Zealand. For me it means an early night, waking again and ten minutes on phone to review of social media, while making a coffee, before settling in for the 01:10 start. A recently that routine was interrupted by awaking to a phone stuck in a never-ending restart loop.
This wasn't a problem, it just meant I had to follow F1 Twitter on my Surface Book while Googling how to get a Samsung out of a boot loop. That turned out to be simple but none of the suggested easy fixes* resolved it. The nuclear option, master reset, did work and a combination of Samsung (phone settings) and Microsoft Cloud meant no data was lost, everything I needed easily restored.
I still have an ancient Samsung S7 Edge and it's good enough until I break it. I occasionally look at the market wondering what I would buy if forced. I haven't seen anything really compelling in the phone market, certainly nothing worth shelling out the dollars top end phones command**.
These two articles by @ChrisMatyszczyk, about not needing and buying a new phone struck a chord. In March Chris, review S20 in hand, suggests his wife upgrade her phone:
A Samsung Galaxy S7 user explains why she doesn't want the S20 | www.zdnet.com
Handset makers are constantly selling us on new phones. How and why do people resist?
Then in September watches her in store on a mission to upgrade to a new phone:
A Samsung user upgraded her Galaxy S7 and I'm stunned by her choice | www.zdnet.com
What difference can a Verizon store salesman make to a choice of upgrade? An enormous amount, as I just discovered when I watched a passionate Samsung user upgrade her phone.
I wonder if that will be me when the day comes...
* From The Droid Guy "How to fix Samsung Galaxy S7 that’s stuck in bootloop"
- Step 1: Soft reset your Samsung Galaxy S7
- Step 2: Find out if the Power key so damaged or just stuck
- Step 3: Attempt to boot your phone in Safe mode
- How to clear app cache and data on Galaxy S7
- How to uninstall an app from the Galaxy S7
- Step 4: Attempt to boot in Recovery mode
- How to start Galaxy S7 in Recovery mode and wipe cache partition
- How to do Master Reset on Galaxy S7
** I'd rather buy a phone and be free to change plans/companies than be locked into a contract so it's not just $X/month extra
