Shit like this makes me miss landlines. They were reliable, dangnabit! Source
Well, this sucks.
My reliable Blackberry KeyONE had a new issue within the last few days, where it shut down and then got started in a reboot loop. It would barely boot, get to the Blackberry logo, and then reboot, get to the logo, and so on and so forth. Not ideal. I eventually managed to get it to boot up all the way by pressing all four buttons at once in some sort of combination force-reboot and 1994 SNES cheat code, and wrote it off as a random thing that happens sometimes with phones. They hit a bug, they get confused, you force reboot it in a way that gets it to dump whatever was bugging out of memory, and off you go.
This is called hubris, friends.
Today, i was listening to a podcast which cut out suddenly. Now, audio on Android can be iffy and my bluetooth headset disconnected in the process, so I figured the bluetooth or audio had glitched, and went to restart the podcast. Except when I looked down my phone’s screen was completely blank. When I tried to turn it on, it started doing the reboot loop again. And of course this happened as I was heading out the door a few minutes late to a date, on the way to which I got stuck in traffic. And since my phone was having A Moment in the passenger seat, where I was trying to charge it from a portable battery pack and trying to reset it while at a stop waiting for the Fremont bridge to go back down, I couldn’t even text to say I was running late. Luckily he was quite gracious and it all worked out, but it was still more nervewracking than I wanted to admit. Plus, I lost my watch at some point so I couldn’t even check the time while I was on the date, which thankfully only mattered as far as getting back to my car in time, and not in the “oh god I must escape” way.
I went grocery shopping (haha snowpocalypse tomorrow haha oh god), and managed to get my phone to boot decently correctly in the parking lot. It crashed again while I tried to read an ebook in line. I got it boot later, but the battery read as super low. I let it charge, got home, and it crashed again. Not exactly my old reliable device anymore!
It was time to call on an old friend.
I dug out my Nexus 5, hacked together a nano-SIM to micro-SIM adapter out of a credit card and scotch tape (thanks, Internet!), and combined the two, adventure-game style, to make a working phone. Its Android version is out of date, but hey, at least I can call and text with Signal. I can even read ebooks on it. The battery isn’t great, which is why I switched off it in the first place, but it’ll do for now.
The real question is what to do next. If i had to guess, I think the Blackberry is reading its battery levels way wrong, causing it to shut off when it has battery, or falsely report it has battery when it doesn’t, that sort of thing. But I haven’t the foggiest how to fix it. It might still be under warranty. I’m honestly not sure. And while the Nexus 5 is a solid phone, I’d need to do some maintenance (e.g. new battery) to get it up to being a daily driver again, and there’s probably a better option out there. So neither of my recent smartphones will easily fit the bill of “new phone for the next while” without repair.
I could pick up a cheap unlocked phone and go with that. Hell, this could even be my chance to put my money where my mouth is and try a Nokia 3310, because maybe having a dumbphone would be good for me. Although I’m not sure T9 texting would be. I have beaus to text! And friends! And, I dunno, friendly robot overlords! But being free of apps, easy web-surfing, and all-the-time social media sounds pretty appealing. Plus I just found out you can buy an old Garmin for car GPS purposes and it works fine, and I know a PC-parts reseller that always has a bin of ’em for like $20 apiece.
The other likely choice is to do the maintenance on my Nexus 5 and put LineageOS or Ubuntu Touch on it. Or get a refurb Nexus 5X and do the same thing.
Any suggestions? Try to fix the Blackberry? Roll with my Nexus as-is? Go dumbphone? Go all open-source? Give up and just start handing out cans with string, creating a lo-fi analog network that stretches across the city between me and the people I care about? Invest in learning morse code and try to bring back the telegraph???
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