First stop was the kiosk in the Costcutter which houses our Post Office to see about the cable. The chap there plugs the Samsung into his computer. The Samsung - if not the computer - responds and we are both fairly sure that there is nothing wrong with the cable. Nevertheless he, quite decently, suggests that I return in the afternoon when his tame geek will be there and who will, no doubt, be able to elucidate the mystery. Which was, I thought, entirely fair enough - but impatient, I move onto Carphone Warehouse. The young lady I had seen the day previous was still there but I get to see a young gentleman, to whom I explain my problem. Well he says, you can hardly expect a phone which was certainly designed and probably built before Windows 8 was invented to work with Windows 8.
But what you can do is buy a memory chip for the Samsung, with the help of which you will be able to move pictures from your phone to your PC. Fine, let's do that I say. But then it transpires that in, order to effect the transfer, I have to take the battery out of the phone, extract the chip, do the business on the PC and then put the phone back together again, a trick I was never able to master on the Nokia. And anyway it all seemed far too clunky for something that I was doing several times a week.
What about a different sort of phone? What about my money back on the Samsung? Young gentleman rapidly steers me to something called a Nokia Lumia 520 which he tells me was built on Windows 8 and will be able to talk to my PC without needing any new software at all, rather in the way of the Kindle. Without giving the matter much more thought, beyond thinking that the now Microsoft owned phone ought to be able to talk to a Microsoft powered PC, I say buy and shortly afterwards I am out in the street clutching a nice blue box containing my second new phone of the week. Young lady looking slightly sheepish.
Some time later, on completion of my morning constitutional, I get home and open the thing up - and a very tastefully got up thing it was too. Someone had put a fair bit of effort into the styling of the packaging, effort which I thought was a good sign; the product ought to match. Started off by putting a few numbers into the address book and then tried a couple of calls, one inbound and one outbound. Talkmobile alive and well, to the extent of both preserving and exhibiting my (small) balance. So, so far so good, the only missing link so far being the very discrete ring tone of the old Nokia. But then comes the acid test: can I take a picture and get it onto the PC? Answer, yes, with the evidence being posted the day before yesterday.
Familiarisation continues, and while I am still very much a novice, I can see why people fall for these things. They really are very nicely put together and do all kinds of things in a very neat & clever way - including, I think, all kinds of ways to spend money, so I must be careful. It was clever enough, for example, to recover and file some ancient text messages from my PC without my prompting. I can only suppose that the phone scanned the PC for Nokia flavoured backups and extracted what it could. With what it could, oddly, not seeming to include my address book, which I have now reconstituted by hand, no doubt with sundry spelling mistakes which will catch me out in the future.
All in all a satisfactory conclusion to the affair and I can continue to shop at Carphone Warehouse.
PS 1: I was very impressed by the quality of the illustration. That a scanner (an HP Deskjet 2050) bundled into the price of the PC should be able to do such things. The original is less than two inches square and the type is pretty small, now more legible here (after you click to enlarge) than it is in the original.
PS 2: I also take a peek at what Google has to say about the phone, to find a vast amount of stuff out there on the subject, some helpful and some rather loud & lurid, and I gather that what I have bought is OK, even entirely suitable for a user of my sort. I suppose someone more careful than I might have done a bit of research - perhaps the pub would have been a good place - first, but I was far too impatient for that. I was in go mode. Plus, I was wary of getting locked onto a phone bore, a species quite common. Perhaps I will become one!
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