Phone blues

[niall_]

Well, seems like my cell phone is officially dead - the (admittedly one) place I went to tried replacing the flex cable (I get the feeling that's the mobile phone equivalent of rebooting a computer to fix it), but as I expected, that didn't fix anything. They feel it's the PCB itself, which makes some sense for a sudden double change in behaviour

Comments

[niall_]

If I get anything done in the last two years, it seems I can't just insert my SIM.. they're all micro-SIM now. Hopefully Bell can trasnfer the info?.. or what if I go to another provider... number can be ported, but I doubt more?.. I know little and my search terms are too vague to be able to find anything.

[dagibbs]

You will likely need to buy a new SIM. The number should be able to be ported to the new SIM, at the same or a different carrier.

An unlocked phone should work on any network, including Bell. One thing to be careful of: if your network pushes a software update to your phone. I have heard of this including a lock-to-network change in the update.

SMS are generally stored in the in-phone memory, not on a removable card, nor on the SIM. Some amount of contacts may be stored on the SIM -- at least they used to have space for a limited number, with limited data.

[niall_]

Thank you. With an Android phone, I don't know how much Google stores on its servers, but yeah, I figured SMS were on the phone itself and are lost. I gather they can't be backed up either?.. I know I once scoured for fun all of my phone's internal memory in windows explorer and never found anything that seemed to be SMS data.

Having the phone locked by an update would not be catastrophic - I've been happy with what I had with some small annoyances.