Why in a double misfortune? Because I bought 2 identical phones and over time each of them developed some problem. They were Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro phones, and each one came from official Czech distribution. However, given the state those phones were in, they wouldn’t have honored the warranty anyway, so I just paid thousands more, but the Czech warranty was useless to me. On the 4th day after purchase, my first phone was run over by a bus, as you may have already read here on this blog.
This phone with a slide-out keyboard was something I had always longed for, but as long as it was still on sale, I kept putting off the purchase. After all, in the period from April 25 to November 11, 2012 I bought 3 new phones, namely the Samsung Galaxy Y, then the Samsung Galaxy S+ and after that the Nokia 101, not to mention the 2 phones I already had. I really don’t know where they came up with the date of November 11, 2012, when I made the purchase on November 12, 2012 at the earliest (on November 22 I received an email from Heureka saying “Thank you for your purchase made 10 days ago…”), and indeed, if my memory serves me right, I bought it on November 12.
The goods, however, didn’t arrive until November 20, because I had asked them what was in the package and tried to change the shipping so they would send it not as a parcel delivered to my door but as a parcel to the post office, and the delivery by them plus Czech Post took at least 3 days. In the end, the goods arrived in a box wrapped only in bubble wrap. There was no padding at all inside the box, and given that it was a relatively large box, the phone must have been tossed around a lot. Anyway, to get to the point, the phone arrived, but the memory card didn’t work in it, and that was a real pain! I tried to live with it for 1 day, but I found that it really wasn’t possible, because half of the apps crashed immediately on startup, other apps crashed when they tried to save something, or threw an error telling me to insert a memory card.
I couldn’t even update to Android 4.0.4, which Sony PC Companion is now offering me:
So what happened that suddenly my memory card works and I can update to Android 4.0.4? It’s simple: yesterday I went for the third time to the mobile phone shop in Karvina (the first time I was there I was a bit naive and above all clueless, since I came with just this phone. On my second visit I also brought along my run-over phone. On my 3rd visit I came to pick up the disassembled phone, which only needed its motherboard replaced).
And that phone really started up and it works! I consider it an act of God, because the repairman/seller kept telling me that it 99% wouldn’t work, that he had seen phones run over by much less weight, like “just” a passenger car, or phones that had simply fallen on the ground, and the motherboard was destroyed so irreparably that the phone was basically fit for the trash. So dear God, thank you so much! 🙂 At first I was horrified at how many apps I had installed on it, but I soon made short work of that.
I successfully tested these phone components: Wi-Fi, mobile signal, charging, PC connection, camera and of course the memory card, and all of it works without the slightest problem. Well, one more thing works only halfway, namely the display. When it is set to any brightness other than the highest, it flickers. That’s why I set it to the highest, where it doesn’t do that. I would really appreciate it, though, if it were the other way around and it flickered at anything other than the lowest. After all, it’s not much fun when the battery usage looks something like this:
It should be noted that so far only one thing doesn’t work at all, and that is the key backlight, for both the touch-sensitive keys and the full keyboard. So I can’t type in the dark, but there is usually some light everywhere, or I can turn on a light, and if it drains less battery thanks to that “disabled” backlight, I welcome that much more than a keyboard backlight.