Yesterday I got a new phone and it was amazing and painful

As I wrote in my previous blog post, I am separating work from my personal life, and yesterday I received my new personal iPhone. It is a nice iPhone 16 plus that looks and feels great and as always when dealing with Apple making the move is very easy. When it comes to some of the apps I am using though… well, let us just say it is a bit annoying to deal with technology sometimes.

Syncing the data

Syncing the data took a while, but everything worked just fine. For some reason the Journal was not syncing and after checking it turned out that the Journal have sync turned off by default. It is a bit weird, but easy to fix as soon as you know it. Everything else worked just fine, as it always do when you move from one mobile phone to another in the Apple ecosystem.

Microsoft however…

My first frustration came when setting up my email in Outlook. I am so used with having my email and calendar in Outlook using my work email, so it never occurred to me that there should be any issues using my personal email this way. Unfortunately though it seems that my email has somehow become messed up as I have had it connected to a O365 business license before. Anytime I tried to connect to it, it breaks because it is now connected to both a business account and my personal account.

To add insult to injury I can now only connect my email using IMAP. While I get my email just fine, I now can’t sync my calendar and I get ads, even though I am paying for both my personal and business licenses. I spent a fair amount of time on this yesterday to try to find a solution, but I eventually gave up. Once my business license ends next year this should work itself out and until then I will use the Family Wall calendar that we use in the family and just sync it to my desktop Outlook.

My second frustration, or rather surprise, came when I started working with Google Authenticator. It seems that for some reason you can not sync the accounts automatically, but you need to do a backup and for some reason this did not work for me. I assume it is a combination of having the Google Authentication connected to my work account on the old phone and my account being a bit messed out due to the license issues.

As a result I had to manually re-add all the accounts. This was not very difficult, but time-consuming, which is ok as I could clean some things up at the same time.

Final steps

Tomorrow I get my phone number moved over to the new phone and with that the move should be complete. I will buy some protection for the phone, but other than that things should be done in terms of moving everything privately to the new phone. I am still playing around with the setup of apps, but overall things feel very good right now, and I am very much enjoying this separation.

It feels good to have a phone that is just mine.