A new phone or tablet is a lovely present and a genuinely anxious afternoon. The worry is nearly always the same one: what happens to my photographs, and will I lose the numbers.
The short answer is that you almost certainly will not, provided you do things in the right order. Here is that order.
Before you touch the new one
Charge them both. The transfer takes longer than you expect and running out halfway is miserable.
Find out the old one’s password. Not the number to unlock the screen. The account password, the Apple ID or the Google account. This is the single thing that stops more setups than everything else combined, and it is much easier to sort out while the old phone still works.
If you have no idea what it is, deal with that first, before Christmas Day if you can. Resetting it is straightforward while you still have the old phone in your hand and awkward once you do not.
Make sure the old one has backed up. On an iPhone, Settings, your name at the top, iCloud, iCloud Backup, and press Back Up Now. On Android, Settings, Google, Backup, Back Up Now. Wait for it to finish. This is your safety net and it takes ten minutes.
Keep the old one for a fortnight
The most useful thing in this entire article.
Do not sell it, do not give it away, do not let anyone reset it, for two weeks. Put it in a drawer, charged. Nine times out of ten you will never need it. The tenth time, something did not come across and the old phone is the only place it still exists.
People are in a great hurry to clear out the old one. Wait a fortnight. It costs nothing.
Setting up the new one
Both Apple and Android now offer to copy everything across if you put the two devices next to each other during setup. Take that offer. It is far and away the easiest route and it moves photographs, contacts, messages and most of your apps.
If it is an iPhone replacing an iPhone: hold them near each other and follow what appears. Quick Start does nearly all of it.
If it is Android replacing Android: there is a cable in the box for exactly this, or it will do it over wi-fi.
If you are swapping between the two: it works, but it is the fiddly one. Photographs and contacts come across, some apps do not, and anything you paid for on one does not transfer to the other. Worth knowing before you choose.
Leave it plugged in and on the wi-fi and let it finish. It will say it is done before it really is. The photographs often carry on arriving quietly for another hour or two.
What to check before you relax
Go through these deliberately rather than assuming.
- Photographs. Scroll right back to the oldest one. If the beginning is there, it all came.
- Contacts. Look for somebody near the end of the alphabet.
- WhatsApp. This one needs its own backup and is the most common thing to go missing. Restore it when it asks during setup, not later.
- Your banking app. Will almost certainly need setting up again from scratch, and often a code from the bank. Do this while you have time, not when you are trying to pay for something.
- Two step codes. If you use an authenticator app, it does not always move. Sort this before the old phone goes anywhere.
Then make it yours
New phones arrive set up for somebody with better eyesight than most of us. Ten minutes here is worth it.
Make the text bigger, in Settings under Display. Turn the brightness up. Put the four things you actually use on the first screen and move the rest off it. Turn off the notifications for anything that is not a person.
That last one is the difference between a phone that helps and a phone that pesters.
If it goes wrong, do not start pressing things
The transfer failing is not a disaster. Your old phone still has everything on it, which is exactly why it is still in the drawer.
What does cause real losses is somebody panicking, resetting the new phone repeatedly, and signing into the wrong account halfway through. Stop, leave both devices alone, and ask somebody.
Bring both to the Friday clinic at Wadswick Green, or ring me and I will come out. January is always busy with exactly this, so if you have had a new device over Christmas and it is sitting in its box because you are nervous about it, that is a very normal reason to ask for help.
Bring both devices and both passwords, and we will do it properly.