A week with the Galaxy Note 10+

Last week I made an impulse buy. I was at the Microsoft store trying to pass time while my kids were enjoying painting on the surface laptops and playing games on the Xbox. I walked around the store in search of something interesting and stopped at the phone display. The display had the newest family of the Samsung Galaxy phones, preloaded with Microsoft business applications. I picked up the biggest model and started to play with it. I liked its bigger edge-to-edge screen and the quality of the display. I must have enjoyed it very much, because I tried a lot of my favorite sites and applications, and compared how easy it was to read on the bigger screen than on my smaller iPhone X screen. I was so absorbed in the comparisons, that I did not see the sales associate approaching.

She was very cordial, and started to chat about the differences between the two eco-systems—Android and iOS, and that most of the applications that I used including work applications ran on both. Then she mentioned that for a limited time only, Samsung is offering \$650 for my trade-in, in case I decided to switch. In addition, because I am a Microsoft employee, I get a gift card for \$150 if I bought the phone in the store. The deal was so good to pass on, despite the anticipated pain of switching from iOS to Android, as I have been using the former since the first iPhone was introduced. I made the impulse buy, traded my smaller screen for a bigger one that was easier on my eyes, and got a faster phone with more memory and storage for virtually peanuts.

Setting up my applications was relatively easy, and since I had my contacts backed up on Google, restoring these was a breeze. Apart from enrolling at work to gain access to Wifi and internal sites, the process was relatively quick and painless. The most difficult part was fixing the text messages and restoring my photos.

When I used my iPhone, I exclusively used iMessage, which meant that my texts did not use SMS messaging when I texted someone with an iPhone. Despite disabling iMessage before trading in my old phone, other iPhones that I texted before cached that information, and so if anyone wanted to text me a message, that text would be lost. It was time consuming to send everyone I text frequently a regular SMS to indicate I switched phones, and to wipe out that cache. That took a bit of a time, and explaining, but I think now we are in the clear.

The more painful process was restoring the older pictures to the phone. I don’t take a lot of pictures but restoring many years’ worth of photos proved to be a challenge. I backup these images on OneDrive and Amazon cloud storage, but as I discovered trying to restore them to the phone, that I cannot select everything to download. I have to select images one by one, and then download them. This proved to be impossible since I had many years’ worth of images and videos.

I then decided to connect the phone to my computer using the high-speed USB-C to USB-C cables, and started copying roughly 35GB worth of photos and family videos. The process was not robust, and the time estimate for completion was ridiculous—roughly in days. I left the phone connected over night to copy as many images as possible and disconnected in the morning to use the phone for the day. At night I reconnected again to resume the copy, but when I woke up the next morning, I found that the copy failed because of dupes, and the connection crashed.

I tried multiple ways to copy the files to get around the dupes, such as copying a month worth of images at a time, but that did not work. Then I thought of an idea: what if I zip all the picture files and copy one humongous file to the phone that I can unzip afterwards. That crazy idea worked like a charm. The zipping took about 20 minutes, the transfer another 20, and I unzipped the files using the phones built-in file manager application. That took a couple of minutes, and I had my older images and videos intact. I was beyond pleased.

My experiences with the phone over the next week were very good. All my applications worked seamlessly, and I am enjoying the better Google voice recognition and map navigation, to the  point where I dictate everything now instead of typing. In addition, despite a slightly heavier usage, my battery life is about 2-days. And did I mention a bigger screen easier on my eyes?