Sometime at the end of May I bought my new phone for the first time, a Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro (SK17i), but it never made it to June – by an unfortunate accident it got run over by a bus (I write more about it at 👻 The server was taken down, the owner moved out, and DNS forgot all about it.). Then I bought 3 more phones: a Nokia 101 (a plain DualSIM), a Samsung Galaxy Y (on my father’s O2 contract) and a Samsung Galaxy S+. I bought the last one because it is very similar – my love Lenicka has a Galaxy S too. Anyway, I was just browsing Heureka, thinking I “had to” buy that phone, because it is white and it is just so amazing. Pure madness, I know.
If I was going to buy it, though, it had to be white – I already have more than enough black phones. On Heureka there was only one shop left offering it in white, namely okay.cz, but for 5,000 CZK. Then I spotted a used, but supposedly fully working phone at a good price – the only thing missing was the battery, but I could take that from my previous “flattened” phone. OK, so I ordered it. What a surprise it was when I found a battery in the package as well.
But what a disappointment it was when I discovered that the phone’s memory card slot does not work! And without a memory card you can barely do anything with this phone. The phone has relatively large internal storage (420MB), but lots of things point to /mnt/sdcard and there is no way to change that. As a result, many apps, such as camera apps, behave like this:
- they crash right on startup
- they cannot take any pictures
- they pretend to have taken a picture, but in reality they never saved it anywhere
In fact, on this phone every app that saves anything always saves it to the memory card. Even if an app lets you change, say, the path for saving and loading, unless you have root you CANNOT save anything to the internal storage, not even create folders there, nothing at all.
So a little phone like this is pretty much useless. Today I took it to a repair shop. Of course I am not going to write here what we agreed on – I will just say that my only stroke of luck is that it is an official Czech distribution unit, so I can send it to the ARVATO service center, because the shop I visited today would not fix it, since they do not know what to do with it themselves.
There is one more option – swapping the motherboard from my run-over phone into the new one, but who knows whether that one is not destroyed too. I am talking about the motherboard and not the slot, because the slot sits on the motherboard and the two form a single unit.