My husband and I are on a family cell phone plan, we’ve been customers of the same company for several years.
Because his old phone sucked, we recently renewed the contract so as to get him a new phone at a discounted price. I was pretty happy with my old phone, so we haven’t upgraded my phone yet, but we have the option to.
Today, I accidentally put his new cell phone through the wash.
If we used the upgrade available for my phone line to obtain a new discounted phone, could we put the SIM card from his destroyed phone into the new phone? I mean, so long as both SIM cards and lines are in use, how would the cell phone company know who had which phone?
Since you are talking about SIM cards, this isn’t Verizon, but I can tell you that Verizon (and probably other providers as well) have no problem whatsoever with this idea. We do that all the time. Someone wants or needs a new phone but their plan isn’t up for another year. Someone else has (at least on the same plan) a contract that’s been up for 2 months but are perfectly happy with their current phone and is sure it’ll last another two years. We re-up that plan to get the phone and set the number for the other person. Verizon has a term for it. Cross-contracting or cross-upgrading or something like that. I assume your provider would be just fine with it as well.
ETA is the phone number stored on the SIM card? Otherwise you’d have to make sure they understand what you’re doing so they apply the right number to it.
As long as you pay your monthly bills, and any line with a “data” phone has a data pack on it, no carrier cares. In fact, they probably like it, because it means you’ll have off-staggered upgrades, which means it’s hardermto switch carriers.
If you take the battery out of the washed phone and let it dry for a couple of days it might start working again. Drowning a phone isn’t always fatal to it.
Former product manager & tech support engineer for wireless phones checkin’in…
We used to get the question about the “bath of infamy” all the time, where folks would carry their phones in a chest pocket, and dunk them in the toilet as they bent over to adjust the seat.
If the water was free of corroding chemicals like salt, and if you can remove the battery right away, you have an excellent chance of saving the phone. Go to wallmart, to the craft section, and get a jug of sillica crystals. It’s used for drying out flowers. Put your wet phone inside a sock or nylon to keep the silica dust off, and then put that in a large freezer bag with a lot of the cristals. Seal the bag, making sure to squeze out as much air a possible. Leave it in there for a couple of days, and try it out. If it works, great, if it doesn’t , then it is indeed toast.
A faster but riskier method is to put it in a VERY low oven (120-150 F) WITH NO BATTERIES for 3 to 4 hours, but there is a risk of damaging the clock cristals.
Alas, if had only been through the washer, I might have tried air drying it out. But, I didn’t find it until the load made it all the way through the dryer. One snugly, toasty warm cell phone with as much functionality as a similarly sized brick.
Glad to hear that the upgrade idea should work and that we won’t have to keep it on the downlow from the cell phone provider.