September 15, 2011 - The Incredible Self-Bricking Cell Phone

The replacement arrived much sooner than expected (the next morning). It's a refurbished thing bearing Verizon's certification seal thingy, and it's just the phone shell. They needed me to swap the battery and cover from the brick to the replacement. It also has ominous red letters telling me to return the brick within five days.

It's a good thing they left a return label still unused in the box, because they stuck another return label to the inside of the box as if it were trivial to tear the box apart, flip it inside out, and put it back together. It's a good thing because it's not trivial at all.

Activating the phone was pretty straightforward. But since I have SMS notifications set up from select sources, customization the phone wanted me to do wasn't. I had to wait until the backlog was cleared, and the default text alert sound is annoying!

So now we get to see if the replacement bricks itself or breaks some other basic feature.