Screenburn

You can count on it, can't you? Things will never go quite as you expect. There's now a glitch in the sale of my old phone to Envirofone. 

Up to yesterday, all looked fine. Their initial offer, subject to inspecting the phone, was £95. I posted it off to them on Thursday 28th January, and today, the following Tuesday, they have sent me an email containing an unexpected surprise.

They say that my old phone, a Samsung Galaxy S8+ bought in April 2017, exhibits something called screenburn. They explain that means icons or images have been burned into the screen. Consequently their offer has been reduced to only £23.75. 

The email invited me to discuss the issue with their Customer Service Department, and so, after reading an online article about screenburn, and studying the many screenshots I'd taken on that phone right up to the moment of its factory reset (all neatly filed away for reference), I phoned them up for more details. 

I had a conversation. I mentioned those many screenshots of mine, and the absence in them of any ghost images that I could see. I was careful to be cautious in what I said, and how I said it. 

The upshot of this is that the person I spoke to offered to email me a picture of what they had discovered. Then we would speak again, very likely tomorrow. 

He seemed to imply that there was perhaps a little room for manoeuvre on the revised offer now made. If there is, then I don't suppose it will be very significant. But you never know. At the moment they are really offering me only basic scrap value. They could come up a bit, and still make a profit. I am prepared to speak very sweetly to get some movement.

I could if I wish have the phone back. If I chose that option, I could then attempt to sell it on eBay. But then honesty would compel me to mention a defect like this, so that the phone might not sell for much. And possibly not at all. 

That on-screen article was on a website called Android Authority - see https://www.androidauthority.com/screen-burn-in-801760/. 

See also the Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_burn-in#:~:text=Screen%20burn%2Din%2C%20image%20burn,uniform%20use%20of%20the%20pixels. 

It appears that, given enough time, a modern phone - especially one with an OLED screen - may develop a kind of shadow on its screen caused by pixels needing a high electrical current to light them up, and then not being able to revert to a pure white afterwards. I vaguely knew about this, but now I know a little more. 

I prefer using a light theme on my phones, but I have immediately adopted the Dark Theme on my new phone Prudence. This will prevent a lot of pixels needing to be lit, because they will be switched off and entirely black. I used Light Theme all the time on my old phone. 

I have also reduced the Screen Timeout from five minutes to two, so that the whole screen goes blank sooner, if I don't touch it. 

These measures should help protect Prudence's screen in the future.  

Meanwhile, I'll be most interested to see where the screen burn was on my old phone. I'm guessing the top edge, where the Status Bar was; although if that was so, I never noticed it. I don't think it could have been the bottom edge - I didn't use any virtual navigation buttons, preferring gestures. Nor did I use the Always On facility, which would display a clock and other things at all times (although it would shift by a few pixels now and then, to avoid lighting-up a distinct group of pixels for any length of time). 

I can now see a good reason not to hang on to a new phone for too long! Might it be best sell it on while it's still worth something, and before any screenburn becomes apparent? After only two years, say? 

But then that puts paying top whack for the latest phone into a very different light. Getting the latest and greatest, and then keeping it for only two short years, looks like a sure recipe for wasting money. High-end smartphones are so expensive nowadays.

A more sensible notion is to do what I've done this time, and buy last year's phone. And then be prepared to write it off entirely after four or five years, so that a tiny scrap value is of no concern.

Of course, I could go back to a phone-and-SIM contract. But I don't want to be tied again to any mobile service provider, stuck in a series of two-year contracts. I was with Vodafone for a long time, but very glad to escape. I'm now with BT Mobile, on a SIM-only basis: they own the SIM card, but not my phone, and once my SIM-only contract is up in May, I am free to go elsewhere anytime I please. I do like complete freedom.