A mysterious phone, found in the desert, slowly reveals its secrets

Everyone who loves puzzles secretly hopes that one day life will drop an interesting puzzle in his lap for him to solve. It may not be an Agatha Christie-type crime, but it is something that will send them on a real hunt to connect the dots and come to a satisfying conclusion.

That’s exactly what happened to Katie Elkin, a retired teacher and puzzle enthusiast. “I’m 84 and have lived a full, wonderful life,” she told me via video call from her home in Prescott, Arizona.

Until now, Elkin’s mysteries have been largely genealogically based. She tells the extraordinary story of making friends with a California woman and discovering that their grandfathers had trained together in the army and then shipped to France in World War I on the same day. “This is my whole life,” she says. “They are coincidences.”

On this Friday in February, we talk about another coincidence in Elkin’s life – finding a phone that had been missing for a decade in the desert, and Elkin’s attempt to reunite it with its owner.

our Phones They are deeply personal items, acting as memory banks that store our most precious data and as portals that connect us to every important person in our lives. These days, if we lose them, Tracking technology It means there’s a good chance we’ll be reunited with them quickly, but that wasn’t always the case.

These disappearances can be very stressful moments for anyone — just ask Apple about the unreleased iPhones it lost again 2010 and 2011which, coincidentally, was around the same time that Find My iPhone feature. But even today, recovering a lost phone means relying to some extent on the good faith and honesty of the person who found it. Many people will choose to do the right thing in this scenario, and some – like Elkin – will go out of their way to help a stranger.

On a sunny day just before Thanksgiving, Elkin and her husband drove about 10 minutes west of town to spend some time outdoors. Prescott is surrounded by national parks and pine forests, but on this day, Elkin was headed into the desert — not to hike, she says, but “to hike.”

Instead of following the well-marked trail popular with hikers and ATVs, Elkin instead split off onto a less popular trail that had been “obliterated by weeds and weeds.”

It was Elkin’s father who taught her that if she wanted to discover something, she had to look for it — sage advice that has served her well over the years. “He was always finding change,” she says. “I can do that too. I always find animals. If we’re driving, I can see them in the woods…always looking for something.”

Searching for something mysterious can lead to the strangest things, and on that particular day, the thing Elkin found was a dusty, beat-up 2012 Samsung Gusto 2 lying on its side, an open shell in the rub.

Elkin picked up the phone, thinking she would give it to a neighbor boy who liked to take apart electronics. But when she brought it home, another thought came to her mind – what if she could get the phone to work?

Like many of us with a drawer full of mysterious cables, Elkin kept all the cords and cords that came with the electronics she’d purchased over the years. She rummaged through her stash and found a charger that would fit Gusto (she still had no idea what it had been used for previously).

when CNET reviewed Gusto 2 — a simple foldable phone released in the same year as the iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S3 — “The build feels sturdy enough to withstand multiple drops and endless opening and closing,” we said. It turns out that our instincts about their potential resilience were correct.

“I couldn’t believe it when the charging happened,” Elkin says. It took a while, but when the phone turned on, I was ecstatic. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I wonder who this phone belongs to?’ And so the mystery began.”

Striving for answers

Elkin went to text messages and began piecing together the Gusto owner’s life, one piece of evidence by piece. The owner worked at a café, seemed to have family connections in Chicago, was a renter, and a lover of hiking. Her name was Maddie.

The other thing Elkin noticed was that the last message was set for Saturday, May 16. This was the only clue she had to point to exactly when the phone had gone missing. I went online and looked up years where May 16 falls on a Saturday. Two possible answers emerged – 2020 and 2015.

Elkin’s Internet research didn’t stop there. She took one of the common text numbers on the phone and ran a reverse lookup. “And bingo! I found a woman’s name with this phone number,” she says. But when I called the number it was off.

“I thought to myself, ‘Who will know where she is?’ Elkin says. “Her father will know.” She found a number listed under “daddio,” did another reverse search and found the name of a man who lived in Chicago. “I was so excited because I was getting close,” she says.

On December 30, Elkin’s birthday, she called the number, but no one answered. She had to leave a message. “I was really disappointed, because I wanted to talk to someone,” she says.

Ten minutes later, her phone rang, but when she answered, there was no man on the other end of the line. “It was Maddie, the one with the phone,” she says. “She came to Chicago to visit her father for the holidays.”

Elkin and Maddie talked for about 10 minutes. “I was amazed,” Elkin says. “We were amazed.” Maddie didn’t want her phone back, but it turned out she lost it in 2015 after wandering to the exact location where Elkin found it.

The little phone that can

For a decade, young Gusteau lay in the desert. Unlike some parts of Arizona, Prescott has four seasons, with all the freezing temperatures, scorching heat, snowfall, and summer storms that come with them. The Gusto has weathered every storm, and although battered and bruised, he still comes back to life.

We don’t have high expectations these days that our phones will last a long time, and we rarely get the full life out of our devices that they have to offer us. Instead of seeking to fix it, when we fail in one aspect, we tend to look for alternatives. Most Americans put away their phones for an average of 2.5 years, according to A Reviews.org poll.

However, it turns out that some phones are built to last, and the Gusto phone was one of them. After Elkin spoke with Maddie, she reached out to Samsung with her story. “I thought to myself: Does Samsung need some fame to have a long-lasting product?”

Any tech company will do it. My first phone, a 2002 Sagem MW 3020, gave up the ghost once it was exposed to the concept of water while wrapped inside a backpack on a rainy day. Despite phone manufacturers’ best efforts to increase display flexibility, many people are still walking around with broken screens.

For as long as we’ve had cell phones, they’ve been vulnerable tools. But whatever secret sauce Samsung put inside 2012’s Gusto 2 shows that it was more powerful than most of the other devices — even though it was open and with its main screen exposed when Elkin found it.

At the time we reviewed the Gusto 2, we gave it Score 7 out of 10with lower scores due to the sub-par screen resolution and the smaller-than-usual headphone jack. It’s too late for us to go back and review this finding in light of what we know about how solid the phone is after 14 years, but it’s entirely possible that the ‘issues’ we’ve highlighted have already played a role in the Gusto’s long-term survival.

Elkin still doesn’t know what to do with Maddie’s Gusto, though a friend suggested that Samsung cover it in gold and put it on a pole at headquarters. Samsung is clearly proud of the phone’s durability, as it put me in touch with Elkin, but it’s also hesitant about how to celebrate the life the Gusto 2 lived. Despite Elkin’s love of mysteries and my suggestion that the FBI recruit her, she’s not about to start a detective agency to reunite other people with their lost possessions. “It’s just a hobby,” she laughs.

This is a shame. As someone who has lost more than one phone over the years, I’d very much like to reunite with lost technology, and I’m sure there’s a market for Elkin’s skills. Not every phone is as flexible as the Gusto. Most devices that have taken such a beating will likely refuse to even turn on.

Perhaps there is a longevity challenge for all phone makers. I can’t promise that CNET will be able to replicate this scenario in our review testing process, but in the age of disposable technology, it would be nice to give extra points for hard-earned durability.