Exactly one year to the day after the TV screen got smashed, I managed to drop my phone and cause a web of cracks in the screen. Not as colourful as the damaged TV screen – and, surprisingly, the phone still worked! How can it do that?! I have just a small crack in my Surface tablet, and that’s totally unresponsive to touch.
So, a hasty selection of new phone was in order. TBH, I’d been toying with getting a new one anyway as it’s 5 years old, and even seriously considered going for Pixel 8 or 7. But the price? Impossible to justify for the extent to which I use a phone. After a couple of hours searching, I decided on another Xiaomi, this time a Poco at just £179. It arrived in a couple of days and seems fine (even though the camera is far from high-end).
I was a bit concerned about whether it would get here hassle-free as the ordering web form was rather weird re the address fields: there was an optional field that couldn’t be left empty, and 2 others were unclear as to what needed to be entered. The address ended up as something like “Grenoside <my street> <house number>, England, Sheffield, Sheffield plus postcode… But… I figured postcode and house number was all that was essential, and it arrived fine via DPD.
Unfortunately, what I thought would be a simple copy from my old phone (still working!) proved rather more tedious. For a start, the supplied microscopic-print “Quick Start Guide” contained not a trace of setup or use instructions! Then I thought I should fully charge the new one, but the charging plug seemed the wrong size as the earth pin was far too close to the other two. Thankfully, it didn’t take too long to figure out that the earth pin could be pushed up to a correct position…
And then the copy process got set up between old and new phones, but the new one said it couldn’t connect… Why? No idea, no helpful message. I just continued with the setup and tried various copy options till it just started doing the copy… Very weird. It took about 5 hours to get the phone into a state I was happy with, making sure apps worked, getting rid of garbage apps, and ditching the default launcher for the old Nova launcher. The main problem I faced was getting my Huawei watch to work with the new phone. I’d disconnected it from Bluetooth on the old phone, but the new phone couldn’t see it. Turned out I had to “Forget” it on the old Bluetooth, and then it was back in business.