A New Phone

Yesterday I sort of got a new phone. The actual phone is the same one I have had for a few months. I just had a new OS put on it and that completely wiped everything I had on the phone previously. Knowing that I periodically would be wiping the phone for such updates, I don't keep anything important on the phone without having an online backup first. Both Android and iOS allow you to keep things like contacts backed-up online or "in the cloud." However there are a number of things that don't get backed up and I am discovering those things today.

I am at the San Francisco airport this evening and realized I am headed back to Utah where I plan to work from home tomorrow. While my virtual private network (VPN) program reappeared on my reset phone, all of my account information got wiped from it. That required a call to the company's IT desk to get it reconfigured. Fortunately that only involved clicking on a link that showed up on the phone in the form of a text message.

While all of my old programs magically reappeared on the phone, none of the shortcuts on the home page remained. About 30 seconds later, they were back where they belonged. Again, I don't keep too many apps on this phone. Had the same thing happened to my personal phone, it would have taken a bit longer.

The final configuration task was entering account information. While my Pandora and Spotify apps could be found on the phone, I still had to enter my e-mail address and appropriate passwords. Now everything is working nicely and the phone is back to the same state as before the complete reset.

Remembering all of the steps required to set up a new phone helps to keep me from constantly updating it to newer and later versions. Perhaps that is why there are not lines around the block at the Apple store with people hoping to get the latest iPhone. I am perfectly happy with my current iPhone and don't plan to upgrade it any time soon.