If you're budget-minded like me, you can't justify spending $700+ for a smartphone when a $100 or less model will suit your purposes just fine.
The two main differences I've noticed with my phone - a Galaxy Core Prime model from about three years ago - is the camera quality and the built-in storage space. Since I have a nice camera to use for photography, the camera issue is not a dealbreaker for me. At 41, I'm probably not your typical cell phone user, either, so my 8 GB of built-in storage works just fine for me. I added an SD card to help with photo storage, and I really don't miss the extra built-in GB.
However, the big downer for me was that no one sells pretty phone cases for my phone model. Again, though, it wasn't worth spending a few hundred dollars more for the option of pretty phone cases. I simply found a clear case for less than $20, added a color card I reference often, and called it good.
I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me sooner to add something pretty, but it didn't ... until I saw a video on YouTube of someone designing a custom-drawn insert for their own clear case. I'm no artist, but I have all kinds of pretty paper and old calendars hanging around. I
love paper, after all.
So I sat down and remedied my boring phone case in less than an hour. It was very easy!
The first thing I did was go through my old calendar stash and look for pictures I liked that would fit inside my phone case. Overly large pictures won't work, but often you can find a smaller detail that works in larger pictures. In this case, it was the sunflower. I love yellow, and I love sunflowers. This was perfect.
The next step was to trace around my phone case. In retrospect, I think it would have been much easier to trace around my phone, but my phone case is clear, so I was able to make sure I had the details exactly where I wanted them. I paid special attention to where I was going to be cutting out rectangles for my camera lens, flash and microphone (at least I think that's what the third rectangle is on my phone). I didn't want that to be in the middle of the main detail of my picture - the sunflower.
Then I played around with it a bit, trimming a little here and there, until it fit nicely into the back of the case. Then I used a pencil to draw around the camera, flash, and microphone rectangles on the case so I knew exactly where to cut and how big to make the cutouts.
Here you can see the pencil marks before I cut them out.
I used a small craft knife to cut out the rectangles. Precision is important here, since you don't want a tiny remnant of paper clouding all of your pictures.
I put it back into the case to make sure it all lined up perfectly before adding the phone. My case is pretty hard to get apart without a screwdriver, so I wanted to make sure I had it just right.
All that was left was to add my phone, snap the front on, and admire the results.
This makes me ridiculously happy. I hope it helps someone else.
If you've done something similar, I'd love to see yours for inspiration!
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