Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsVery good condition, as advertised
Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2023
No screen or body scratches. Like new condition, IMO. Charges fast with supplied charger and cable. Battery life too soon TBD. Also purchased a milspec phone case with screen protectors, which I do for all of my devices and suggest for everyone.
Installed and used Samsung Smart Switch app to transfer all my old S8+ phone apps, settings and files to the new one, using wifi direct phone-to-phone. Easy to do but took almost 5 hours to complete due to lots of apps plus huge number of files on the old phones SD card, which automatically transferred to the main 128gb system storage on the new phone. A few settings, like themes and wallpapers, were not applied during this process, but were easy to fix after. I also have a couple of apps that are licensed and locked to a specific device, (Norton360 and IGO Navigation) and had to uninstall them from both phones then reinstall on the new one. For Norton, I also had to go to my Norton account on PC, remove the old phone and add the new one. Not an issue, just a consideration and a few extra steps.
Would have liked to have SD card support, but had researched and knew going in that the 128gb built-in storage would be more than adequate for my needs, including for about 70gb of photos and MP3 audio files I had on the 128gb SD card of my old S8+ phone. I do wonder why it needs 39gb of storage for system files though. Almost 4GB more than on the old phone. That seems extremely excessive to me, but might just be the difference between Android 9 on the old phone vs Android 13 on the new one (after all system updates).
Another consideration, which is not really a complaint, as I knew it would happen, is that getting all of the 30+ OS, security and other updates took almost 2 full days to accomplish from a freshly factory reset phone, which this is. This is something that should not be allowed to happen according to the default automatic processes and schedule, as that could take weeks. You need to manually go to Settings / Software Update / Check for Updates, and download and install the recommended system update. Then repeat and repeat and repeat again, as many times as needed, until it says no more updates are needed. If you ever need to do a factory reset, you may need to do it all over again. If you ever sell your phone, remember to do a factory reset to remove all of your personal apps, settings and data, and let the new owner know that they might need to redo this system software update process.
Final note: If you are upgrading to 5G for the first time, and have an old 4G SIM card in your old phone, you will need to get a new 5G SIM from your carrier in order to have 5G capability. For the phone I bought, and my carrier, this was Verizon. I chose to do this only after finishing all of the Smart Switch and system upgrades described above, which only needed wifi. Verizon swapped out my SIM card for no charge.