New smartphone

My entry level smartphone has been frustrating me somewhat in the past few months. There are two major problems with it, which may be connected: there is no provision for adding a memory card and sometimes applications will not update as there is not enough ? (memory or disk space) for them. Otherwise, the phone is satisfactory. Getting an upgrade was very simple: I went to my manager and explained my problem. She immediately wrote an email to the person who deals with phones and he ordered me a new one.

Originally I was offered two models: either the Samsung Galaxy S5 or LG 4. My son in law recommended the LG, so I asked for this; when the phone came yesterday, it was the Galaxy. Not very important to me. My first action with the new phone was to charge it completely which did not take very long. I wanted to extract the SIM from my old phone and insert it into the new one but was stymied at the very first hurdle as I couldn't open the old phone! As I also wanted to buy a memory card and a protective cover, I decided not to do anything on my own.

Today I went to a mobile phone/computer shop nearby. A 32GB card cost 65 NIS, about $18, and the cover a bit less. The salesman opened my old phone with no problem and extracted the SIM; this was 'full size' and thus too large for the Galaxy (just as well that I didn't try this on my own). He used a tool to cut the SIM to the correct size - actually he cut it too small and had to use an 'adapter' in order to get the SIM to fit. Apparently there are three sizes of SIM: large, small and very small. On top of the SIM he inserted the memory card; we checked that everything worked and then I was on my own.

I quickly discovered two facts: the physical controls on the phone are subtly different from those on my previous phone, and that the operating system has been upgraded from 4 to 5. These two facts caused me no small bother at first, but I think that I'm getting the hang of things. After getting everything connected, several apps started downloading - this already is something new, as previously I had to wait for a wifi connection for this to happen. Several of the apps are superfluous to my needs so I uninstalled them.

I connected the phone to the mobile computer and restored photos and ringtones which I had previously saved. Using a Google account means that I had no problems restoring contact information. I then started personalising the phone: setting up the shortcuts to what I wanted, etc. In doing so, I discovered some new tricks: I can 'star' contacts then see them in a special view (making it easy for me to dial them) and discovered how speed dial works (after assigning numbers to the contacts, a long press on the given number dials the speed number). This meant that I could remove the phone short cuts which I had added to the desktop, thus allowing a better view of the background - naturally, a picture of my granddaughter. I also set up some albums in the gallery and discovered how I could move pictures from album to album.

Now that the data, shortcuts and similar are set up, there remains the task of getting used to the new buttons. I'll look again at the manual which I downloaded yesterday in order to learn what does what.