So maybe I should take what the (Meta) algorithm has been feeding me as omen. Over the past month, I’ve being shown rants from Samsung owners groups about the dreaded screen issues like lines running vertically across their phones and dead pixels that sprout and spread like the plague.
I thought I was lucky that this hand me down of an S22 has been spared such fate and that the miser in me would rejoice since I wouldn’t have to worry about replacing my phone until the wife tosses me her current one sometime 2027.
But no. I noticed this black hole around the front camera suddenly appear last week. I thought it was just some software bug in the screen cutout but apparently, it’s already a bunch of dead pixels. A hardware issue. And it’s growing. Word is, you wouldn’t know when the entire screen would just croak once this happens.
A broken screen can pretty much lock you out of your phone and render a lot of things – email, social media, money, work, apps – inaccessible. Restoring access to such accounts could set you back weeks in productivity.
Considering I’m in a critical juncture work-wise, I couldn’t afford any further mishaps. Just a week into 2026 and this phone thing is already the fifth curveball that life has thrown at me this year and I seem to be just swinging wildly and missing.
Shopping apps and chilly January dawns are recipe for brain fog. I ended up panic-buying a new phone. Hours later, I found out that I paid a tad above market price for it and that better value models are actually available had I shown just a bit more patience.
The order’s now in transit and part of me already fears that I’d get a bunch of rocks instead.
How’s your 2026 so far?