Wednesday 14th October – The Death of my Galaxy Note

Day

I drove to work, dropping Bronwen off on the way. I even managed to find parking which wasn’t too far away, and didn’t take half an hour to find. So far so good.

Lunch

It was very hot outside, but my Subway was delicious and I found that mint aero chocolate was half price at Woolworths. Things still seem to be going suspiciously well?

Evening

I finished work, getting things done, not dying, not breaking any bones… everything was going far too well… and then it happened. Just before I shut my computer down to leave, my phone (which I wasn’t even touching at the time) spontaneously restarted. Except it didn’t. It went as though it was going to restart, and stuck on the loading screen. I packed up my computer and started walking to my car, figuring it’d magically come good somehow. I held down buttons on it to make it reset. I removed the battery. I removed the battery again and waited longer. I entered recovery mode (which instead of being a recovery like it should be, is now just a little picture of an Android with something confusing going on in his tummy). I got to my car. My poor old Galaxy Note still would not start up.

Night

I drove to Bronwen’s work. Unsurprisingly, my phone hadn’t magically fixed itself by the time I got there. This was a bit of a problem, as I had no way of contacting Bronwen to tell her what was going on. I figured after I hadn’t called her she’d try calling me and when I didn’t answer she might come down to see if I was already waiting, but she didn’t. Eventually I found a lady who was sitting waiting for a lift and asked her if I could get her to send an SMS for me. She wasn’t very keen on the idea but eventually agreed, and Bronwen arrived shortly after.

We drove up to Bronwen’s parents’ place to have a look at her Mum’s laptop, which has roughly the same symptoms as my phone—it won’t boot either. We had a delicious dinner there and didn’t manage to fix the laptop, or my phone.

After I got home I spent some time trying to talk to my phone, but nothing I did worked. I couldn’t connect to it in any way. It is, it would appear, fundamentally dead.

I ordered my Galaxy Note on Sunday 13th May, 2012, and it arrived five days later, on Friday 18th May 2012. That’s 1244 days, or 3 years, 4 months, 3 weeks, 5 days ago. Not bad for a phone I suppose—it’s been around the world a couple of times, had many different ROMs and things flashed to it, been re-partitioned, and generally tinkered with in ways it wasn’t supposed to be. It cost me $508 ($489 for the phone, and $19 postage) from Kogan, and was the world’s largest, and fastest, phone when I got it.

I shall miss it.