my first Samsung Galaxy pics

Not a very auspicious beginning—no photos of Korean dragons or sharknadoes or anything—but here are the first three pics taken with my new smartphone:

Above, you see the very first shot I took while lying in bed. The colorful gift bag is what the phone-shop guys gave me on my way out the door Friday night. Shampoo and toothpaste, basically. A lot of toothpaste. I won't need toothpaste for a few years, I think. So I got dat goin' for me. Which is nice.

Below: three of my four vinegar traps. The bottles look as if they contain basil leaves or something, but that's just the warped reflection of a black plastic bag sitting behind the traps.


Finally, a pic of yours truly, happy to have a phone again. The phone-shop guys gave me a slew of frills: a thin plastic protective cover that they placed directly over the phone's touch screen (it doesn't impede the haptic interface at all), as well as a molded, billfold-style protective cover for the entire phone. That may be one reason why I'm happy. Another reason might be that my new phone has a front-facing camera, which is how this shot was taken. No more guesswork as to where the camera's button is.


The screen of my new phone is even more high-resolution than the screen on my poor, dead Droid (it died a while ago, yes; I'm going to take it in for repairs so I can salvage its data). The camera's viewfinder is also amazingly clear. I don't know how many megapixels I get with a Samsung Galaxy S 4 LTE-A, but I imagine I can look the stats up easily enough (ah—here we are: front cam = 2 megapixels; rear cam = 13 megapixels, 1080p resolution).

When I first plugged the phone into my Mac by USB, my computer didn't recognize the phone. This seemed like a bad thing: how could I access the phone's photo files? But because I had downloaded the Android File Transfer program (originally to extract files from my Droid X), I was able to use that application to view the Galaxy's files. The icing on the cake is that, because my computer still doesn't recognize the existence of my new phone (even though the Android program does), I can simply unplug the phone from my computer without having to go through the annoying eject procedure. Win-win.

I'm impatient for Monday, 1PM. At that time, I can punch the long code into my phone and activate it. Once that happens, I'll be back inside the great hive mind of 2013-era civilization.

Oh, and I just downloaded the English version of the phone's user manual from here. I see that the phone shown in that manual is slightly different from my own, but I trust the manual is still at least 90% applicable to my situation.


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