Viktoria Jean

It takes an incapacitated phone, with no means of immediate resuscitation, to let go of my digital being and live in the moment.

It’s been three days since my 6-month-old Samsung Galaxy Flip 4 flashed the black screen of death, completely unprovoked since I’ve been very careful. No scratches at all. So it’s probably a production fault that my screen cracked at the beam (the infamous fold in the middle). Looks to me like it’s a long way before Samsung can prolong the life of their foldable screen and improve its usability.

Samsung service center insisted on sending my phone back for a factory reset, with which I would lose all of my data. It’s a Flip 4 thing – apparently they build the LCD screen into the motherboard, so in order to change the screen, there’s a lot of hassle to replicate the internal data before changing the LCD. I’ve got so many important files I cannot afford to lose in there. The Samsung Service Center guys are contractors who just give the standard answers: factory reset and lose all your stored data.

To top it off, they ran out of loaner phones (only 10 sets per center, and it gets all loaned out everyday).

Basically, this new phone is dead to me.

So as my first foldable phone, this is also probably my last. Probably my last Samsung phone too, judging from the responses I’ve been getting from their support. I’ve always used my phone for three years at least. Samsung Galaxy Flip 4 is the only phone that barely lasted 6 months.

Dead phone aside, the past days have been liberating without a phone to tempt me with social media scrolling and the urge to check my WhatsApp and emails. There were zero pings on my Garmin watch since the Bluetooth link to my notifications is dead.

I’ve been the most present parent to my boy since he was born.

For the sake of making sure I have physical copies of my boy’s growing up photos, I printed over 100 Instax polaroids of my favourite images of him. And bought a toy film camera to prepare for his 1st birthday party, as I’d probably be still without a working phone judging from this back and forth with Samsung support.

As someone who works in tech, I now know the feeling when a customer goes to TAC support and doesn’t get his or her hardware/software issue sorted out. Or waits forever for a resolution.

So I will not wait.

My point is, memories don’t rely on a 6-inch gadget with a working screen and xxxGB of data. Memories are always on the go, ready to be made.

With this, I’m liberated of this lame gadget.

Damn you stupid Flip 4.

xoxo
Jean