After 1,5 years with a Samsung Galaxy S Plus which was actually my first smartphone at all, a change was needed, because the display had some scratches already for quite some time and the contract was about to expire and so it made sense to change.
Since I had a phone contract, I selected one of the cheapest options possible, the Galaxy S3 mini for one extra euro. Back on this day in 2013 I did not expect that I would still have it in Mid-2017.
And for some reason over all the years it just got one little almost not visible scratch, but I dropped multiple times, at least on 50 occasions... I did not count, it´s just a random number. How often did it end up under the bed, on the streets with the outer cover and the battery forcefully removed from the phone. And that at the three different continents and multiple countries.
I even lost it a few times: Last year for example, while hiking north of San Diego on some hills with warnings signs of snakes I noticed that my phone was no longer in my pocket. On my own I decided to walk the entire path back checking every corner. At a moment I almost came to a point where I thought I went past, I found it: Half covered in sand, but still running and not damaged.
In the same month a few weeks before while traveling through Canada and the United States the Pokémon GO hype started. And I wanted to be part of it. Unfortunately my phone was not ready: Android version too old and no Android 5 officially available, but I stayed confident and updated the phone to a Cyanogenmod with Android Lollipop (as you can read here). But only until September, I was obviously banned, could not login anymore with my email address - it was not available in PlayStore anyway, I needed to install it manually as an apk file.
But this upgrade to Android 5 gave the phone a new life. It ran faster and having a new GUI let me initially felt like I got a new phone. But then I already noticed: It needs a bit more of battery.
Financially it was also a nice solution: I let my phone contract expire and switched back to prepaid including a little basic mobile data flatrate. For just a few euros a months it was a quite attractive solution to keep that phone for a while.
But now anno 2017, it got slower and the storage was more and more on the limit since the WhatsApp database and other apps where taking more and more space. After moving the Spain at the beginning of the year the bank there offered me a LG K5 for free. That´s why I switched phones a few days ago, moved every data and application to the new phone.
And that´s why the story of my Galaxy S3 mini now ends after 3 years and 11 months, after travelling to many countries around the world, joined me to the highest point of Spain, the Teide, got lost a few times, but nobody wanted to steal it...
It still works and I will keep it - just in case.
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