I finally broke down and bought a cellphone.

Nothing fancy, just a Sanyo SCP-3200 with Sprint as the carrier. There is nothing spectacular about this phone; it's got basic functionality, it's small and lightweight, and is a good solution for someone who doesn't like to talk on the phone in the first place.

Sadly, this phone had an unfortunate interaction with the inside of a toilet bowl, resulting in the white screen of death. Despite having been submerged in water for less than two seconds, the screen was completely shot, a victim of "massive water damage."

Fortunately, the screen was the only part of the phone that was damaged, but it could not be repaired, so I purchased a new phone of the same model. My new problem was how to get my contacts and other data off the old phone. Stupidly, I went to Radio Shack to purchase a data cable for $9.99. The data cable came with the HandsetManager software, which the manager at RadioShack said would help me retrieve my data from the broken cell phone.

Much to my dismay, the manager did not know the product he sold me, or else he would have known that the software does not support my phone. After searching the internet for a few hours, it became clear that a lot of people did not know how to connect their computer to the SCP-3200.

One tip led me to DataPilot, which is not free. Despite paying for a data cable and software, I had to shell out another $39.95 for the DataPilot software, which was risky considering the fact that I had no idea if it would work or not. Out of the box, this software did not support my phone. I had to update the software several times and from several different places before I could finally connect to my phone. Once I was able to do that, the software did a good job of reading the data from the phone, allowing me to edit the data and save it to my computer, and then send the data to the new cell phone.

The user interface is not the best, being neither intuitive nor visually appealing. However, it is very functional software, except it does not support ringtone editing on my phone, or photo editing. These pieces of missing functionality don't bother me though, as I use neither function on my phone.

So the bottom line is, if you need to connect to a Sanyo SCP-3200 cell phone, one solution is to purchase a data cable and DataPilot, and make sure you update the software after purchasing it.

[tags]cell+phone, DataPilot, HandsetManager, RadioShack, Sanyo, SCP-3200, Sprint, water+damage[/tags]