Everyone who loves mysteries secretly hopes that one day life will drop an intriguing puzzle into their lap for them to solve. Maybe not an Agatha Christie-type crime, but something that will send them on a real-world chase to connect the dots and land at a satisfying conclusion.
That’s exactly what happened to Katie Elkin, a retired teacher with a penchant for mysteries. “I’m 84 and I have lived a full, wonderful life,” she tells me over a video call from her home in Prescott, Arizona.
Until now, Elkin’s mysteries have largely been genealogy-based. She recounts an extraordinary story about making friends with a woman from California and discovering that their grandfathers had trained together in the Army and then shipped out to France in World War I on the same day. “That’s my whole life,” she says. “It’s coincidences.”
On this Friday in February, we’re talking about another coincidence in Elkin’s life — one of finding a phone, lost for a decade in the desert, and Elkin’s attempt to reunite it with its owner.
Our phones are immensely personal items, serving both as memory banks that store our most precious data and as portals that connect us with every important person in our lives. These days, if we lose them, tracking technology means there’s every chance we could be quickly reunited with them, but that hasn’t always been the case.
Those disappearances can be high-stress moments for anyone — just ask Apple about the unreleased iPhones it lost back in 2010 and 2011, which, coincidentally, were around the same time it introduced the Find My iPhone feature. But even today, recovering a lost phone means relying to an extent on the goodwill 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 above and beyond to help out a stranger.
On a sunny day just before Thanksgiving, Elkin and her husband drove about 10 minutes west of the city to spend some time outdoors. Prescott is surrounded by national parks and ponderosa pine forest, but on this day, Elkin was headed to the desert — not for a hike, she says, but an “amble.”
Rather than taking the well-marked trail popular with hikers and ATVs, Elkin instead split off onto a lesser-known path “obliterated by the grasses and the weeds.”
It was Elkin’s dad who taught her that if she wanted to spot something, she should look for it — sage advice that’s served her well over the years. “He was always finding change,” she says. “And I can do that too. I always find animals. If we’re driving, I can see them in the woods … I’m always looking for something.”
The phone found by Katie Elkin.
Looking for a vague something can turn up the oddest of things, and on that particular day, the something Elkin found was a dusty, beaten 2012 Samsung Gusto 2 lying on its side, clamshell open in the scrub.
Elkin picked up the phone, thinking she would give it to a neighbor boy who liked to take electronics apart. But when she got it home, she was struck by another idea — what if she could get the phone to turn on?
Like many of us with a drawer full of mystery cables, Elkin has kept all the cords and wires that have come with the electronics she’s purchased over the years. She dug through her stash and found a charger that fit the Gusto (she still has no idea what it was used for previously).
When CNET reviewed the Gusto 2 — a simple flip phone that came out the same year as the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S3 — we said: “the construction seems strong enough to withstand multiple drops and endless opening and closing.” Our instincts about its potential resilience were, it turns out, correct.
“I couldn’t believe it when it came up charging,” Elkin says. It took a little while, but when the phone turned on, she was ecstatic. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I wonder who this phone belongs to?’ And so that was when the mystery began.”
The quest for answers
Elkin went into the text messages and started to piece together the Gusto owner’s life, clue by clue. The owner worked in a cafe, she seemed to have family connections in Chicago, she was a renter and a keen hiker. Her name was Maddie.
The other thing Elkin noticed was that the last message was marked Saturday, May 16. It was the only evidence she had to indicate when exactly the phone might have been lost. She went to the internet and looked up which years May 16 had fallen on a Saturday. Two possible answers cropped up — 2020 and 2015.
Elkin’s internet research didn’t stop there. She took one of the commonly texted numbers in the phone and did a reverse lookup. “And bingo! I found a woman’s name that had that phone number,” she says. But when she called the number, it was disconnected.
“I said to myself, who would know where she is?” says Elkin. “Her dad would know.” She found a number listed under “daddio,” performed another reverse lookup and found the name of a man living in Chicago. “I was so excited because I was getting close,” she says.
On Dec. 30, Elkin’s birthday, she called the number, but no one picked up. She had to leave a message. “I was really disappointed, because I wanted to talk to somebody,” she says.
Ten minutes later, her phone rang, but when she picked up, it wasn’t a man on the other end of the line. “It was Maddie, the owner of the phone,” she says. “She had come to Chicago to visit her dad for the holidays.”
Elkin and Maddie talked for around 10 minutes. “She was amazed,” says Elkin. “We were both amazed.” Maddie didn’t want her phone back, but it turns out she had lost it in 2015 after hiking in the exact spot that Elkin had found it.
The little phone that could
For a decade, the little Gusto had been lying out in the desert. Unlike some parts of Arizona, Prescott has four seasons, with all the minus temperatures, scorching heat, snowfall and summer storms that come with them. The Gusto weathered every storm, and battered and bruised as it was, it still came back to life.
We have little expectation these days that our phones will last us a long time, and we rarely get all the life out of our devices that they’re capable of offering us. Rather than seeking to get them repaired, once they fail us in one respect, we tend to seek out replacements. Most Americans hang onto their phones for an average of 2.5 years, according to a Reviews.org survey.
It turns out, though, that some phones are built to last, and the Gusto was one of them. After Elkin had spoken with Maddie, she reached out to Samsung to let them know her story. “I said to myself, ‘Does Samsung require some kudos for having a product that lasted that long?'”
Any tech company would. My own first phone, a 2002 Sagem MW 3020, gave up the ghost simply by being exposed to the concept of water while wrapped up inside a backpack on a rainy day. In spite of the best efforts of phone-makers to increase display resiliency, many people are still walking around out there with cracked screens.
For as long as we’ve had mobile phones, they’ve been vulnerable pieces of kit. But whatever secret sauce Samsung put inside the 2012 Gusto 2 shows that it was more robust than most — even though it was lying open with its main screen exposed when Elkin found it.
At the time we reviewed the Gusto 2, we gave it a score of 7 out of 10, with points knocked off for its subpar screen resolution and a smaller-than-usual headphone jack. It’s too late for us to go back and revise that score in light of what we know about how robust the phone is 14 years later, but it’s entirely possible that the “problems” we highlighted actually played into the Gusto’s long-term survival.
Elkin still doesn’t know what she’s going to do with Maddie’s Gusto, although a friend has suggested that Samsung clad it in gold and put it on a pole at headquarters. Samsung is clearly proud of the phone’s durability, having put me in touch with Elkin, but is also undecided about how to celebrate the life the Gusto 2 has lived. In spite of Elkin’s love for mysteries and my suggestion that the FBI recruit her, she isn’t about to start a detective agency to reunite other people with their lost possessions. “It’s just a hobby,” she laughs.
That’s a shame. As someone who’s lost more than one phone over the years, I would dearly love to be reunited with my missing technology, and I’m sure there’s a market for Elkin’s skills. Not every phone is as resilient as the Gusto. Most devices that have taken such a battering would likely refuse to even turn on.
Perhaps there’s a longevity challenge for all phone-makers. I can’t promise CNET would be able to replicate this scenario in our reviews testing process, but in an age of disposable tech, it would be lovely to give extra points for truly hard-earned durability.