It took me a while to figure out the most important thing, though. What, you ask, is that? Well, besides finding a cute new case (see photo), it's figuring out how to block all those irritating spam phone calls, of course. Seriously, I have added my number to the DO NOT CALL list, but that doesn't really seem to stop some of these people - especially 'Rachel' from Cardholder Services. That girl has more numbers than anyone I know!
On my previous phone, I had started adding the number of every single irritating caller to a contact I named Spam! And then I simply told my phone to block that contact. That way any time they tried calling me, my phone wouldn't ring, and the call would go straight to voicemail. Amazing how they never bother to leave a message...
When I got this new phone, I tried to do the same thing, but when I tried editing my Spam! contact, I didn't see any option to block the calls. I started getting all these phone calls that I had been blissfully unaware of before. I'd drop what I was doing, dry my wet soapy hands, etc. to answer my phone, only to see it was a call from my good buddy Spam! I finally changed the ringtone, so I could tell without crossing the room or looking at the phone who was calling and could therefore ignore those calls. Still, it was irritating.
I checked the Galaxy S4 manual - Thanks to Janet for letting me know when I called to activate my new phone that it was available on the U.S. Cellular website! Unfortunately the information I found in the manual only let me reject callers one number at a time. I have no idea how many numbers I have in this one contact, but the idea of having to reject or block each number individually was a bit discouraging, so I just started ignoring the calls when they came in or rejecting them manually. I even answered one once. Big mistake.
Then, my wonderful husband, who also happens to have the S4, called one evening to tell me he'd figured it out - because I might have complained about it a time or two... Turns out it was incredibly simple - just not in the same place and done the same way as my old phone, so I'd missed it. Looking at the manual now, I see I missed it there, too. Because it's right there, in the section on Contacts.
- From the Home screen, touch Contacts
- Touch a contact to display it, then touch Menu
a whole list of options will come up along with the important one: - Add to reject list
Mark the contact so that calls or messages from the contact are rejected automatically.
Now, something tells me I should sit down and read the rest of this manual. There are a lot of things I can do with this phone, but not if I don't know how.
