Post-325: Using the “Galaxy SIII” (Samsung)

Eighty million Samsung Galaxy SIII (S3) phones were sold between its release in May 2012 and May 2015. One of them ended up in my hands in December 2013, and has been used nearly every day by me since then.

(Until December 2013, I used a cheap but reliable “non-smart” phone. A lot of people around me were getting smartphones in 2011-2013, but I considered it not worth the money. I knew people paying $80 and up a month, and I was focused intently on saving in those days. One of my first posts here, Post #22 [“Phone Birthday”] was about this.)

From time to time in Korea, in 2014 and 2015, I’d get comments that the phone was “too old” (generally from students), but this never bothered me at all. If it works, why replace it? It’s true that the Galaxy S7 will be released in 2016 or 2017, but the higher models I’ve seen seemed to have only marginal improvements, as best I could tell.

Samsung Galaxy SIII. (Mine is white.)

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“Used, but hardly used, like new” was how the seller described the phone that would become “my phone.” The seller was someone in Korea who was upgrading to an S4, or something. I don’t recall the exact sum I gave him, cash, but it was something like $150. The original price of a Galaxy S3, upon release, was something like $750 (if bought outright)! That was only a year and a half earlier, at that point. I thought I got a great deal, and it does still work…

Owning the phone outright, rather than paying a theoretically reduced price on installments mixed in with phone service, allowed me to use a much-cheaper prepaid service. For my purposes, this meant about $15 a month for 3G Internet and for phone calls. I believe text messages cost two cents, but I generally used a messaging application.

My Galaxy S3 phone’s “birthdate” (manufacture date), printed inside the battery compartment, is March 14th, 2013. This is around the birthdate of this very website.