Wednesday, March 4, 2009

My Cell Phone Caper!


I’ve been catching up on 2+ weeks of blog reading. I lost touch while getting ready to go to Florida, driving there, and settling in. I finally got Internet service in the place I am renting on Monday, however today I am sitting at a Panera Bread bloging, surfing and having lunch. There is no home spring training game today and a cold spell. Well that is cold for Florida it is in the mid-sixties.


Reading about pita-woman’s and junosmom’s cell phone stories prompted me to write about mine. I left for Florida on 2/23. On 2/20 I went to the Sprint store as I was having a problem with the screen on my cell. It was a flip phone and half the time when you flipped it open the screen was just gray!

Of course I was quickly talked into a new phone at no cost to me, if I signed on for another 2 years. (Well I wanted a new one also.) All phones I was shown had a built in camera. I thought I may at some point actually take a picture with the cell, but certainly would not be posting “random photos from my cell phone” as Passage of a Woman recently did. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I use my cell phone for PHONE calls.


I picked out a phone but asked how to get the pictures out of the phone? I was told that I could use “PictureMail” or buy a data cable to connect the phone to my computer. With “PictureMail” I could email or text message the pictures to anyone. I did not even ask the price of this service and opted for the $15.95 cable.


On Sunday, I took a “test” picture, and then tried to download it to my computer. I hooked up the data cable and the Setup Wizard told me that it had no idea of where to look for the driver or firmware needed for this cable! I went to the Sprint site and could not find anything!

I left for Florida on Monday 2/23, stopping in Acworth, GA and Ocala, FL. On Tuesday evening I visited the Sprint store in Ocala with my problem. I was told that I needed to go to the “SamsungWireless” web site to get the firmware. I visited this site but they did not have what I needed. I then sent an email to customer support. The reply: this phone DOES NOT support download to a computer!


On Thursday, 2/26 I went to the Sprint store in Port St. Lucie FL. A very helpful salesman said he would gladly exchange the phone for one that had the capability I wanted. I explained that I had left the charging cord at home. No problem, but did I have the car charging cord with me? I said no problem it was in the car that was parked in front of the store. The new phone actually has an SD chip that you can store the pictures on. I made the exchange and drove home. After another test picture, I attempted a download. Of course I failed to exchange the data cable and it is a well know fact that each cell phone has a uniquely constructed output port!


Thankfully the Sprint store is near the baseball stadium, so after the Friday game, I exchanged the data cable. I can now actually download pictures from the phone to my laptop. I even uploaded the UCONN Huskies ringer and a picture of my grandchildren as a screen saver! Now if I can only get the phone to ring loud enough so that I can hear it ring when I have it tethered to my belt!

2 comments:

Junosmom said...

Well, that's cool! I have Sprint, but they want to charge me $5 or more a month to upload my photos. My phone is a piece of chicken turd. I need a new one.

pita-woman said...

I'm sooo glad to know I'm not the only one that gets sucked into these cell phone con jobs.
I only take photos with my phone to assign to my address book, so the person's picture pops up when I receive an incoming call from them.
But like you, I attempted (basically just to see if it worked) to download to my computer. Needless to say, the memory card, while it fits into my card reader, isn't "recognized". Gee, what a shock.