Of Course I Broke My Windows Phone…

Some of our more faithful readers know this already, but I’m hell on phones. I broke an iPhone (twice). I beat up a Speck Candyshell Satin (the finish wore off, and the bottom started to crack from taking it on and off), and a Speck FabShell (fabric started to peel). Back in the pre-smartphone days I cracked the outside screen of a Motorola Adventure tough phone.

Really, I can’t have nice things.

So of course I broke my Windows Phone. It was inevitable. The phone is square, so corners get hit harder. And since Verizon is the only carrier of the Lumia 928, no one makes a decent case for it. (As a complete aside, this has always driven me nuts with Verizon. Even in the days of my old Razr I couldn’t get a case for it because the Verizon version was just different enough that cases wouldn’t fit). With no case, when I dropped it from a barstool-height table at Scotty’s Brewhouse, the screen broke. And it broke really well. Mostly in the corner, and smoothly so my finger didn’t catch on the crack. It was a kind of broken I could deal with.

Around this time the phone started acting up though. It needed to be rebooted every day (sometimes twice), often from the screen freezing up or freaking out (lots of buttons being pressed with a single touch). I didn’t really connect the dropping to the screen issues initially. After all, none of my other phones had done this. But when I contacted the cell phone repair place I’ve used in the past, they informed me this would not be a simple $100 repair. It would be a $265 repair because the phone uses a LCD/digitizer combination. So where I was able to just have the glass replaced on my iPhone, now we’re getting into electronics. Even online I couldn’t find an “unofficial” way to replace just the glass.

The other bummer of the situation isn’t the fault of Microsoft, Nokia, or even Verizon. It’s that the phone isn’t popular or common, which means it’s worth nothing broken. So with my iPhone where I could offset the cost by a cheap repair, or even selling the phone broken, no such luck with my Nokia 928. It’s worth $10 at the Microsoft store in the form of a gift card. That is all. Although at least the phone was free with a new contract.

So while I do love my Windows Phone, I’ll be going back to Android. I need a phone that can protected, and worst case repaired. I’m going to order a used Samsung Galaxy S4 from Glyde when there’s one available. I’m going to lick my wounds and move on. I still think the Windows Phone 8 operating system is solid, sure it needs a few tweaks, but it works well. The camera is still amazing, and allowed me to take storm damage photos at night perfectly. And if you are on a network where you could get the Nokia 920, you’d probably be good. You’d be able to get a good case, and if something happened it’s at least worth something cracked ($48.00 at time of writing).

But a phone that can’t be protected, can’t be cheaply fixed, and can’t be sold broken just doesn’t work for me.