The benefits of future-proofing your phone...

For a while now, my phone has been acting up a little. I'd already addressed the two-year-old degrading battery (it wasn't able to hold a consistently long charge any more, which is fairly normal for regularly-charged batteries) by replacing it for a new one, but there were other problems to contend with; Some apps had been locking up, others falling over. It was all down to a lack of available space on the device storage, both onboard (32gb) and on the storage card (another 32gb).

There are only so many things you can do in these situations, and I'd done most of those by yesterday; those were, in no particular order:

• Deleting unused or seldom-used apps;
• Deleting old photos (I use Dropbox to back them up, so nothing's been lost);
• Clearing out old data (pruning).

But it was clear yesterday that I had to do one last thing. I got a bigger storage card. The phone, a Samsung Galaxy Note 3, running Android, is capable of addressing a maxim card size of 64gb. So, I went looking.

A LOT of high street tech shops were asking silly money for both branded and unbranded kit, so I began looking online instead. However, I wasn't about to go to e-bay for this, being mission-critical kit (some things, yeah, I'll use e-bay, but not vital electronics like this, as there are too many knock-offs). Amazon, however, stepped up nicely.

With Amazon, you can generally be safe in the knowledge that even their third-party 'marketplace' concession retailers have an assured supply chain to the brand-name kit. In this case, I found a 64gb microSD card from Samsung listed for under FIFTEEN QUID?! Wow. I snapped that one up for same-day delivery faster than you could say "Cool!"

Amazingly, it arrived by 6.30 p.m.! Good Job, Amazon Logistics! :D

It's a Samsung-branded 64gb class 10 microSD card, and was in the proper packaging, WITH hologram. It had Japanese printing on the packaging, nothing surprising there, it was likely a grey import, hence the price. I have no problem with that for simple tech like this.

So, I set-to immediately and backed up the old card (I'd done this a couple of days ago already, but it's a good habit to get into when swapping around storage media.

I then de-mounted the old 32Gb card, installed the new 64gb one, mounted it, formatted it just like you're supposed to using the phone, and that's when I hit a hiccup. The phone did not now want to talk to my computer. So, I tried putting the card directly into the card slot on the laptop (via a card adaptor). No dice, it couldn't read it. So, back into the phone, and try again. No joy.

Time to check the old internet. And came up successful in my search for a solution. Seems that occasionally, when changing cards, the interface settings get upset. So, I confirmed it to be set to 'USB Mass Storage Device' instead of 'MTP Device', and we were back on the rails again. Nice :)

So, I copied the backup of the 32 gig cad onto the new card, did some more general data pruning, moved a few on-board apps to the card, and whoopee - I've got back close to 15 gigs of space on the on-board storage on the phone, and still have over 40 gigs of space on the new card :) I call that a win, folks :D

As a result, this phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 3), which was 3G (4G-capable) when I got it, and which three months later was software-enabled to 4G (UK Three network), has probably another year to two years of practical life left in it (by which time, chances are some form of 4.5G or 5G will be on the horizon, if not in service already) :)

This is another reason why I buy phones with card slots and removable batteries :) It's called Future-proofing a phone ;)

Also, a hint - take regular back-ups of your data, whether it be a phone or a computer; you NEVER know when you might need to access those backups!

The party's now private: Three UK ends all-you-can-eat uncapped data for new contracts.

Well, I suppose the party had to end sometime. Three UK are not offering unlimited - excuse me, all-inclusive  - uncapped mobile data any more.

I went to their service for two reasons: Better overall coverage in the places I generally frequent, and All-You-Can-eat data, which was not capped in any way shape or form, so as to cut my comms costs in half, as per this blant entry.

Well, it's too late for you if you haven't jumped on that band wagon. They've quietly changed the bundles they offer. Now, if you want to tether your machine to your phone, there will be a 2Gb cap on the monthly amount of data that it consumes. As they say in their brochure on the topic:

Your data allowance can be used as a personal hotspot (we used to call this tethering) – if  you choose a plan with all-you-can-eat data, you can use up to 2GB of this allowance each month as a personal hotspot.

Note that they make no difference between the types of Wi-Fi or hard-wired tethering - excuse me, personal hotspot - or how they will determine this is occurring; presumably some form of monitoring software that you can't remove will be installed before you receive your new phone, as I cannot figure out, without some form of packet sniffing (where the content of what you are viewing is monitored in real time) occurring. As for sim-only contracts, who knows how they'll determine if you're tethered to a PC or not.

So, the party just turned private. If you're in, you've got it. If not, you missed out: You cannot get the One Plan-style uncapped contracts any more.

But here's the thing. If you're on one of the new sim-only contracts, and instead of putting the SIM card in a phone, you opt to leave it in a 3G or 4G-capable tablet or notebook, how the heck will they know it's not a phone? And will they cap you at 2Gigs?

I sure hope they got this thought all the way through, because somewhere down the road, they may well pee off someone with a law degree and a Bar certification, and as a result could easily wind up defending themselves for breach of contract.

It'll be interesting to see how this progresses.