Categories
Family Technology

Lost and Found My Phone

Samsung S4

Last night I discovered my phone was missing.  I knew I had it on the bus coming home.  In the house I realized it was not in the holster.  After searching the car I figured it was somewhere on the bus.

Cathy called the bus line to find out the bus was heading back to NYC for another run.  We thought that if I was lucky I might get the phone back in a couple for days.

I use Sprint’s family locator app to track the where abouts of MJ and Jill.  Actually I track their phones and because they would never separate from the phones, I can reliable find them.  The family locator app sends periodic messages to all the phones that I have tracking turned on, so Cathy and the kids all know that I can track them.

After getting off the phone with the bus line, Cathy turned to me and asked if I could track the phone with that software.  I had MJ install the family locator software on his phone and configure it to track mine.  We then spent the next 2 hours watching my phone travel up the turnpike, into the Port authority bus terminal and back down the turnpike.  We quickly called the bus line to find out the route the bus was taking and the stops.  Turned out the last stop was in our home town, Lincroft.

As we watched the bus travel, MJ and I drove over to the bus stop.  We had to wait only 5 minutes for the bus to arrive.  The bus line sent a text to the driver that someone lost their phone on the bus.  As I approached the bus, he was fully aware of  why I was there.  The phone was resting nicely between the wall of the bus and the seat.

The only downside was that before we started tracking the phone, I had started to look at the new Samsung S5.  Guess now I’ll have to wait a year before I upgrade to that phone.

Categories
Technology

Bye Bye Droid, Hello EVO

moneyAfter 18 months my Droid died. The front touch screen stopped working. It was very frustrating to not be able to answer incoming phone calls. I was also frustrated by Verizon. With my original contract long expired and the fact that I had three phones with them, they would not give me any kind of deals for a new phone. Verizon wanted me to spend more than $150 on the phone itself and enter into a 2 year contract that would cost me $180 per month.  Plus the current deal they were offering only provided one phone with data and had a 5Gb limit on the data plan.  Verizon wanted $60 to add a second phone to the data plan.

I had the complete opposite experience with Sprint.  First, they converted all three lines from Verizon to Sprint and provided for free new smart phones for all of us.  Second, the family plan they put us on provided unlimited data, messaging and mobile-to-mobile for all three phones. We also had a 1500 minute per month call usage when not dialing mobile-to-mobile.  With our current dialing usage for all three phones, it is a very heavy month when we use 1000 minutes a month, with most of the usage coming from me.  Third, they bought back my broken Droid and MJ’s cell phone.  Cathy’s cell phone was so obsolete, for a moment, I thought they might pay me to dispose of the phone myself.

Between the conversion credit for moving the three lines, plus the buy back of the old phones, we essentially get three months of service for free.  Total cost per month for all three phones to have the data plan, including taxes….$160 per month.

Talk about a no-brainer.

I ended up with the HTC EVO 4G.  MJ went with the EVO Shift.  Cathy was dragged into the 21st century, getting a Samsung EPIC.

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