I have written several times about how I am not stingy, but there are certain things in life that I refuse to buy the latest and greatest of. One of these things is mobile phones. When I accidentally destroyed my old phone by it getting wet, I went a week without having a phone and it was actually kind of nice to not be able to be gotten in touch with during that time. Therefore, when I finally relented and went to go and get a new phone, I wasn't really enthusiastic about getting one that had all the latest features that are available.
I've always kind of thought that friends of mine who would spend $1000 on a phone, particularly when these same friends are the people I know that are usually in financial dire straits, were idiots. Therefore, when it came time for me to purchase a phone I was looking exclusively at the cheapest ones that the store had. The phones were arranged in cabinets by price points, and the only cabinet that I was looking at was the ones that were barely smart phones at all. The only cabinet to the right (where even cheaper ones were kept) were flip phones or just phone that have no app features at all. I was unaware phones like this still existed.
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Although the thought did occur to me to maybe get one of these I need access to 2FA and they can't do that. So I went to the left and was talking to the sales person and simply told them that I would buy ANY of the phones that would work with both my Thai and my Vietnamese simcards. We tried a few of them and eventually landed on the Samsung A03. This phone was just a little bit over $100 dollars and I played with it for a little while and thought "yeah, this is fine." Well here we are less than a year later and I seriously regret this purchase.
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Since I am not a heavy user of anything on a phone I figured that I wouldn't care how slow it is and at least at first, I was ok with it being very low-powered. I am NOT envious of people that have $1000 phones that can do all sorts of cool but useless crap but I made a mistake by not buying at least a mid-range phone.
For starters, this phone takes absolute ages to do almost anything. I frequently sit there as it stalls trying to do something simple like just open a messaging app. Then, even though I am not a fast finger typer anyway, the phone frequently hangs and can't keep up with how fast I am typing.... which is not fast.
Also, and this should surprise absolutely no one, it takes terrible pictures and video. Combine this with the fact that simply opening the camera app takes quite some time and now I don't really even bother to take many photos at all. My old phone, which was a Huawei something or other, had a fingerprint login that was super convenient in my mind because it was right where your finger would be if you were holding the phone in a normal fashion anyway. With the Samsung A03 you basically have to use the old school password login, which is a huge pain in the ass. It technically has facial recognition, which I am not a fan of anyway, but 95% of the time it doesn't recognize me and I have to enter the password anyway.
To make matters worse, apps will frequently crash and this is really annoying in situations like when I accidentally call someone instead and I am incapable of cancelling the call because the phone is shit slow.
Next week I am going to make my way to the mobile shop and get something more middle of the road. I REFUSE to spend $1000 on a phone no matter what features it has.
The crazy thing about this phone is that it is by far the cheapest phone I have ever had yet it is the only one that I have not damaged at all. The screen is in perfect condition whereas every other phone I have ever had has ended up broken at one point or another. I don't even have a protective case for it either.
So I suppose I have learned a bit of a lesson here. The cheapest of something out there at least as far as technology is concerned is probably just a waste of money. At least this lesson only ended up costing me $120 or so but I think in the future I will do a bit more research than just running down the store and buying whatever works.
I will not trade in this phone but instead just leave it in a drawer somewhere in my house as a backup for 2FA and really, nothing else.
Lesson learned I guess!