I've no doubt that you get customers wanting to transfer content saved from their old phone - on to their new phone when they're buying their new phones.
Have you any anecdotes that you can tell us?
Back in the day, when I worked as a Sprint sales rep, we were brazen. This was before smartphones and iPhones—back when the most advanced devices were basic camera phones. At the time, Sprint had a system where photos sent via your phone were automatically saved on a server. Customers could log in to a website to view, save, delete, or print their pictures. If someone forgot their password, they could recover it by entering their phone number through a simple link on the site.
Around 2004, some store employees realized this. It became a kind of game among the sales team. If a beautiful woman came into the store for a phone repair, replacement, or service, all the guys would rush to help her. The lucky sales rep who got to assist her would often access her photos through the website. If the rep wanted to share, they’d pass around the login credentials (her phone number and the retrieved password). I still have lists from that period, but they are useless because the site was defunct in 2012
I vividly recall moments like this—helping a customer while holding her phone, sending the website password to her device, and simultaneously viewing her nude photos on my monitor, as she stood right in front of me.
When smartphones came onto the scene, the strategy shifted entirely. Early on, transferring data to a new device required manually extracting everything. This often meant dumping photos and videos onto a technician’s laptop before transferring them to a thumb drive. The fun with the old camera phone method was, that the photos would update as they would send photos to people. With smartphones, you only get what is on the device.
I remember that if a particularly striking customer came in, I sometimes took it a step further. When we started buying back old phones, I would occasionally "borrow" their old device overnight. I’d transfer all the photos and videos from their iPhone or Galaxy to my personal computer at home, giving me the chance to go through everything more thoroughly for anything interesting.
I have hundreds of photos from back then, I've searched through them, but they are not as great as some of the photos I've found on here.
I haven’t worked at T-Mobile since 2020, so I have no idea how things are handled these days. I assume it was this way around the country, not just the West Coast.
