I’ve never been the kind of person who needed the latest and greatest in phones. I will buy a phone and use it until the case falls apart and the device is no longer usable. I’m also strange in that I don’t want a large phone – I have small hands and small pockets, therefore I want something comfortable to use.
Back in March of 2016, I purchased an iPhone SE to replace my very first phone – an iPhone 5S. This weekend, after putting almost 6 years into my SE, I finally was prompted to replace it with a new 2020 model SE. This will make the third phone I’ve ever owned.
I was rather sad back when my iPhone 5S kicked the bucket shortly into its second year of life. The battery was expanding (you could see it physically warping the screen) and it had done some damage to the phone. I looked at my options, and it seems battery replacement isn’t an easy thing to track down unless you know someone personally.
So, I replaced it with the original iPhone SE model. As if to make up for my first phone’s short lifespan, this one has been trucking since 2016. Technically, it’s still trucking, but just struggling with no storage space and an iffy battery life.
Last year, about the time the new SE released, I noticed that my phone was quickly running out of space. It only has a 16 gig drive on it, and the size of the OS has expanded quite a bit since I bought it 2016.
Not to mention, apps that I’d like to use, such as Pokemon Go, stopped supporting the old SE, despite the fact that I was still on the latest version of iOS.
Updates became a chore as the phone would offset and uninstall apps just so the OS had enough space to download the files needed for updates. Eventually, I’d removed all music, videos, photos and any apps I really didn’t need on a daily basis. The lack of space was a real issue.
Still, it was an issue I worked around. And I did for as long as I could. It wasn’t until I woke up one morning this past weekend to a phone with 1% charge that I started to get concerned. It wasn’t THAT low on charge when I went to sleep that previous night. Not to mention, I never let my phones run under 40% charge, period.
So this clued me into the fact that maybe it was starting to have some battery issues. I’d already been there done that with my first phone, so I took it as a sign that it was time to bite the bullet and buy a replacement.
I already knew that I wanted to replace it with then 2020 version of the iPhone SE. The new phone is on the smaller side as far as iPhones go, though it’s still larger than my old SE.
What really surprised me was how easy it was to set up and transfer all the stuff from my old phone to my new. Of course, given my space limitations, this wasn’t very hard since I didn’t have much on it.
The new phone initiated the process and as long as I kept my old phone next to it, following the prompts between the phones, the transfer went off without a hitch. In less than 10 minutes of unboxing, my new phone was up and running, almost duplicated from my old – right down the the fat cat wallpaper!
A few of the apps needed a refresh and a log-in, of course. But once that was done, and I sent a few test texts, I was quite pleased with the outcome.
The nice thing is that the old phone still connects just fine to wi-fi. So while I can’t text or call from it, I can leave it in the back room for things like checking websites or social media apps if I want to. I just have to be mindful of the battery life on it.
Even better… I can now play Pokemon Go again! And, to top that off, there are finally Pokemon that spawn around my home! But… that’s for a different post, right?
