While I was at a farm in Pitt Meadows back in August to purchase boxes of blueberries for winter freezer storage, my phone reminded me there was a good pass of an amateur radio satellite coming up momentarily. Seeing as I had my satellite antenna and radio available, I decided to take advantage of the flat location, with a clear view to the horizon in the south. I needed to see the satellite track on the phone, so I placed it on the only reasonably level spot I could find, just below the windshield of the car, wedged against the wiper.
You can probably envisage the rest of the story.
You’ve heard stories, I’m sure, about mobile phone withdrawal. How about stories involving phone loss, where you know exactly what has happened to your phone? Only you can’t find it.
Twenty minutes after I left the blueberry farm and just a block from my own home came the realization of what had become of my phone. I immediately drove back along the route to the farm, searched the spot in the gravel parking lot where I’d used the phone, and inquired if anyone might have found it. The farm people recalled me using it with the satellite antenna, but that was about it.
I searched where I’d made a left turn onto the main road, from the farm, a natural spot for the phone to have slid off the car. Nothing. I drove back along the same route I’d taken earlier, paying particular attention to spots where I’d made a left turn.
Once back at home I made a key decision. I checked on Google’s Find My Device service, knowing that I had this utility running on my phone. There it was. On the map. Exactly where I thought it would have fallen off the car, during that first left turn. There was 1 per cent battery left. And it had last checked in a minute or so earlier.
And so began the effort to recover my phone, a lovely, albeit slightly dated, Samsung Note 8, housed in an OtterBox case and having a Ghost Armor screen protector. Google’s service said the location of the phone was reliable to within 16 m. I immediately returned to the location with my son, and we began a search. My son tested the service with his own device and found it showed to within a couple of metres.
About five minutes after we began looking, we indeed found a phone, but we concluded it surely wasn’t mine. It was about a metre off the road, in tall grass, and about a metre from a very deep ditch. It was essentially unrecognizable. Smashed on both sides. Likely hit by one or more vehicles. It did say “Samsung” under the broken screen and had a barely intact screen protector. A sticker on the back had a still-readable model number and IMEI number. About three metres beyond the phone, I found half of an S-pen of the type found in all Note phones.
When located on site, the phone was dead. There was no Otter Box case to be found. So much for that legendary protection. It looked somewhat like my phone, but I was certain this was someone else’s. I even tried two experiments with the phone positioned on the car just as I had done so foolishly earlier, in an attempt to see where it might come to rest, but on both trials the phone refused to budge, perhaps because it was now devoid of the smooth case.
We continued searching for a further 20 minutes, convinced that the device we had found wasn’t mine, despite the unlikely occurrence of finding another phone in a random and remote location where Google’s service said my phone had come to rest.
While bringing the phone back into the house, I accidentally gripped it in such a way that it powered up, albeit only briefly. I placed it on its wireless charging base (this phone has never been charged through a cord), and it immediately began charging. At that point I used the phone ringer option in the Find My Device application, and the phone began ringing. It was indeed my phone!
About half the screen lit up, although in an unusable format. The volume buttons worked. But that was about it. I couldn’t unlock the phone, through either the numeric keypad, which was invisible, or through face recognition.
My son and I then spent several hours seeing if we might be able to pull data from the damaged phone. The phone did connect to my Windows computer over USB, but only to the point of recognizing the device. No file structure was visible. We tried remote installation of apps such as Samsung Flow, but without access to the damaged phone’s screen there was no way to approve such an installation.
Eventually, after concluding that further action was beyond our capability, I took the phone, such as it was, to Mobile Klinik, a chain of repair stores recently acquired by Telus. I expected to be laughed out of the store when I showed the phone to one of the employees, but it was quite the contrary. Despite the sorry state of the device, the employee was completely confident that any and all data on the device would be retrievable.
Furthermore, he said it could be done for $90. The only question was where that data should be moved. I explained that I did not yet have a replacement phone. I told him my plan was to eventually get a late model Note phone, even though there is some uncertainty about Samsung’s plans for its flagship line.
What I didn’t realize at the time is that Mobile Klinik, in addition to repairing phones, sells refurbished phones one to five years old. Having already seen the street pricing for such phones through Facebook Marketplace, I settled on a model two years newer than my almost defunct Note 8. This Note 9 had a new screen and a new battery and double the storage of my handset. After a little negotiating, we settled on a price, which I was surprised to learn, included the data recovery and transfer fee.
Mobile Klinik cloned my Note 8, basically by temporarily attaching a new screen to the damaged body and then connecting that body to the replacement device so that after two hours the replacement Note 9 looked identical in setup to what I was used to. All 175 apps or so were in place, and the home screen was configured as it had been. Even seven days’ worth of photos that hadn’t backed up to Google Photos were restored. All that remained for me to do was to log into my Gmail/Google account and wait a little while for all those apps to finish installing.
Oh, there were one or two minor issues. The technician was unable to pry loose the SIM card in the damaged Note 8. I sorted that out at a nearby Telus store, where I was issued a new card at no cost.
And when I went to sign into my Google account, I was unable to complete the process. Google insisted on a two-factor authentication because of the detection of a new device. That authentication was in the form of a notification pushed to the phone. The problem was that Google pushed it to the destroyed phone. For a moment I thought I was sunk, but Google also pushed the notice to an old Samsung tablet that by pure happenstance I had powered up that morning. Once I clicked on the notice on the tablet, all was essentially complete.
It did take an hour or two for all the phone apps to come to life, and I had to run through two major Android updates.
One item that wasn’t restored, and that it seems cannot be restored, is autocompletion from the unit’s keyboard. All the phrases, unusual spellings, even foreign words “learned” by the previous phone died with that phone. The new phone has to “learn” from scratch.
That aside, count me as an impressed customer, although hopefully not a repeat one, of Mobile Klinik. Recently the business has expanded to bring a repair centre on wheels directly to customers’ homes to service problems such as cracked screens, water damage, and broken speakers or microphones.
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