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How long have you had your current mobile phone?
| 6% | 9 votes |
| 10% | 15 votes |
| 16% | 24 votes |
| 31% | 47 votes |
| 16% | 25 votes |
| 6% | 9 votes |
| 0% | 1 votes |
| 12% | 18 votes |
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- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
How long have you had your current mobile phone?
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Q: Why was Stonehenge abandoned?
A: It wasn't IBM compatible.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by KritonK on Monday May 26, @05:50AM
I have a Nokia 3310 (2017 edition) [wikipedia.org], which I bought in December 2017. Apart from a few minor scratches on its screen, it's just as good as it was when I bought it. When/if it breaks, I'll probably replace it with whatever retro Nokia model is available at that time.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 27, @05:41AM (1 child)
A former colleague of mine works for a wireless provider. They are keeping their 2G service running way past their original deadline because of a couple of important users refuse to switch to something newer. One of those is a very high level individual at that company that uses a bar phone from the 90s as their personal phone. They can't convince him to change it and the fact he abhors the fancy iPhone that has to use for work doesn't help. My colleague told me they are now doing a graduated phaseout. However, they are specifically avoiding parts where said individual frequents until his projected retirement date.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 01, @07:37AM
2G has higher peak radiation than 4G[1]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935121001961 [sciencedirect.com]
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBMWgiQujPw [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by number11 on Tuesday May 27, @05:53AM (1 child)
Bought phone used off eBay to: 1) get a phone whose USB-C connector wasn't dying (those connectors are not designed for daily use), and 2) get something that Google hadn't stopped issuing updates for. I rarely use it for anything except voice & very occasionally (every few weeks) texts. I miss flip phones that would easily fit in my pocket.
(Score: 4, Funny) by HeadlineEditor on Tuesday May 27, @12:21PM
This right here. I miss my old RAZR. When I was young and skinny enough to wear skinny jeans, these didn't disrupt my sleek profile quite so much. :)
Now I'm old and fat and I can't see, so I have a huge new iPhone that fits fine in my big baggy cargo pants and I can actually read what's on the screen.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday May 27, @02:28PM (4 children)
My prior phone (Pixel 5a 5G) was purchased almost exactly three years ago early next month. It worked great. No complaints. Last November I was thinking of replacing it when it turned three years old.
So I was browsing for the possible replacement I would get when June 2025 came. I never buy leading edge and try to buy close to trailing edge. Google successfully tempted me with a discounted Pixel 8a that had 256 GB of storage. My last two phones have had 128 GB. I moved my existing SIM to the new phone. Everything good. I was surprised how completely, how easily, and how seamlessly Google makes it for everything, apps, data, music, etc to transfer from one Pixel phone to another.
So what do I do with a perfectly good old phone? It continues with the job it did before I bought the new phone. Playing mp3s or YouTube Music all night.
In fact, other than making calls and using SMS, the old phone is totally functional on WiFi. I can play games on it and not run down the battery on my primary phone.
I've always wanted, since my first cell phone in, I think, the 1990s, to be able to upgrade phones and still keep my old phone in good condition. For various reasons this never happened. Until now. Often the old phone was a hand-me-down. Or someone in my house wanted it for "yet another camera".
I like for a near trailing edge phone to last for at least three years.
There is nothing wrong with trailing edge phones these days. New phones offer very little meaningful improvements. A trailing edge phone today beats a top of the line phone from ten years ago. The improvements with each model year seem very unimportant to me.
Especially AI.
Putting a WHERE clause on a SQL UPDATE statement is just adding unnecessary complexity to something simple.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 27, @09:05PM (1 child)
> New phones offer very little meaningful improvements.
The enshitification of the OS and preinstalled software is accelerating. I don't want a vendor approved email account, app store, messenger system, cloud storage or anything else.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday May 28, @02:35PM
But what about AI Everything! A phone with AI features touching everything you do!
Putting a WHERE clause on a SQL UPDATE statement is just adding unnecessary complexity to something simple.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28, @02:02AM
A few months ago I bought a Pixel 5a specifically to run one of the alternate OSes- I think it's Graphene. Haven't had time to mess with it though. But you might look into that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 30, @09:27PM
Staying on the trailing edge allows you to avoid things like the Pixel 2 or whatever it was that we got three of in the family and then every single one proceeded to die of infinite boot loops about 16 months after launch.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday May 28, @01:49AM (1 child)
I only retired my Cat S60 when G3 was dropped. Now I'll stay on the Cat S62 Pro until G4 is dropped.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28, @10:17PM
You've got at least 7 years then. The 4G LTE sunset isn't scheduled to begin until at least 2032. And that assumes you live in the US and they vote to begin the phase out process at their first opportunity.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday May 28, @12:38PM (4 children)
How do you keep your battery running longer than a couple years, when phones are designed to have unreplaceable batteries to encourage sales?
I use accubattery on several phones now, and I'm consistently losing 5 to 15 percent of capacity annually. Eventually capacity dips below a day and then I need a new phone as I'm not playing the "charge the phone multiple times per day" game, which will certainly kill the battery even faster.
Individual phones vary. My current cheap $50 phone has lost about 15% of capacity in the last two years, which isn't bad. I can still go almost two days between charges.
My use has probably declined some over the years, although I still read ebooks and listen to music and audiobooks a couple times per week, pretty much daily on average I'd guess. Gaming on phones seems to have died except for addiction apps, and I'm not addicted to those so I have no reason to game. I remember when the idea of a pocket gaming device seemed so futuristic and exciting and then all we got was repetitive animated slot machines, which is either hyper addictive to some fraction of people or utterly boring to most.
I have a LG V.35 that I use as a mini-tablet I guess where the battery life is about an hour, had a google branded phone that eventually decayed below 8 hours of battery...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by zocalo on Wednesday May 28, @06:35PM (1 child)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 29, @12:23AM
> too much on my plate
That's the problem I have with phones. I used to go to some trouble to install custom ringtones, backgrounds, sideload indie games, delete crapware, and so forth. Then the provider pulls the rug out from under me by deprecating the phone. At least they sent me a new phone for free. But I don't care to spend the time customizing a new phone every year. I suppose I could use that online backup feature to transfer contact lists and settings and all to a new phone, but I really don't like the idea of others having my contact list.
One thing I did was let voice mail fill up. Text me, don't voicemail me. I would prefer not to have voicemail at all, but it seems that shutting that off is not an option. So letting it fill up is the only way I have found to disable it. I get spammed that I need to make room in my voicemail box. There's no telling the system that I purposely let that happen, and to just shut up about it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Tork on Wednesday May 28, @08:26PM
I'm running an iPhone 13, that's from 2021, and as of this morning it says I'm at 88% capacity. Now that's Apple telling me that, but I feel like the number's probably correct. As for what I'm doing to maintain it, the answer is it's rarely discharged. I sit at a desk all day for work then I come home and sit in front of my TV and I have Qi chargers at both those places. To put it another way if you were to stop me when I'm out picking up my daughter from school or something you'd find my phone charge at 100% or really close to it.
Now I do want to mention that this is my first "work from home" phone, so it's not going with me to the office every day or anything like that. My previous phones, despite having a similar setup with Qi chargers all over the place, all showed more significant degradation. I honestly don't know if that's because I was discharging them more often OR if a tech improvement is showing results. My job used to have me travel regularly enough it's hard to find a level ground to do some reasonable estimates on.
On a side note I wanted to mention that Apple did make one change that, to their detriment, is helping me hold on to my phone longer: 120hz refresh. I remember making a fart-noise when I first heard about it... I mean, really, 120fps on a mobile? BUT... Apple made a big spectacle about that. My previous phones, aged with updates, would start stuttering, etc. Sooner or later I'd want a new phone because everything's soooo slooooowwwwww. Planned obsolescence, right? Well when you advertise such frame rates stuttering becomes a much larger eyesore! Long story short, this is the OLDEST iPhone I've had with no perceptual lag with the interface. Heh.
I expect to go another year with this phone. Hopefully Apple doesn't read my critique in the mean-time.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 01, @02:12PM
So maybe your assumption is wrong and you're doing it wrong? Keeping the battery between 20% and 80% is better for battery life.
Charging multiple times a day does not necessarily kill the battery faster. Depends on how you charge it.
I usually slow charge them (some USB ports won't supply more than 500mA, go figure) and to not more than 80% or 4.2V whichever is lower. On previous phones I was usually stopping at 70% (4.1V), but I found my batteries were lasting longer than the other stuff on the phone. My current phone has an option to automatically stop at 80%, so now 80% is it.
I also try to avoid charging them when the battery is hot (e.g. > 34C).
If it's a sunny and/or hot day and you're using your phone as a nav device in the car and it's exposed to sunlight, the phone tends to heat up a lot.
I have Tasker set to play a sound and alert when the battery is too hot. It also plays a different sound + alert when too cold. If the phone is too cold, there can be condensation if you suddenly transfer it to a humid spot. Condensation can damage the phone.
(Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Wednesday May 28, @01:43PM
I'll keep phones a relatively long time. I'm not a heavy user and I haven't had much trouble with battery degradation. The thing that gets me looking for a new phone is when the oleophobic coating gets worn off the screen. For me, sometime in the 2-3 year range I notice the screen is always a smudgy atrocity that is way harder to clean and has to be cleaned more often. That gets me looking for a replacement phone.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Thursday May 29, @07:56AM (2 children)
Still working on the original battery, recharged every day. The last OS update I applied allows me to charge to 80%, which still gives me more than a full day's use. It handles my email and web-browsing, although the browser doesn't work on more recent websites, which is irritating. Other heavily-used functions are the timer (cooking, parking) and the calendar (appointments, birthdays), and a note-taking application. I often take a picture of things like prices in shops and other items I need a record of that in past times I would have noted down on the small reporter's pad I carried with me always.
Re note-taking - I would really like a combined database/spreadsheet - something easily do-able with SQLite, but no-one else has that itch, apparently, and I don't have the time to code it up myself. I frequently want to keep track of things that have multiple similar records and some simple arithmetic.
I read the occasional pdf on the phone, in landscape orientation. And I use a calculator app, either the built in one or an RPN HP-35 emulator, depending on my mood.
There's a couple of games I play every so often, one of which is Sumplete [sumplete.com].
I'm currently two revisions behind on OS updates: I have not got around to upgrading it yet. Too many other things to do.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Sunday June 01, @10:50AM (1 child)
I have my old phone loaded with all sorts of apk's. Networking. Offline stuff. Wikipedia ( AARD ), thesauruses, all sorts of sensor apps, calendars, compass, gps, wire tables. Refrigeration tools. Car fix tools, spectrum analyzers. Music. File backups for my other systems, file transfer tools. Voice recorders. Note pads. Eatery discount apps.
It's a Star Trek Tricorder. 256 Gig of it.
The one thing it doesn't do is place/receive telephone calls! But I can still tether to my paid phone to get discounted hamburgers! Or download stuff off the 'net, or FTP files to or from my other machines.
I don't have any personal info and all the loyalty apps point to my avatars.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday June 04, @08:45AM
How do you do the tethering?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Thursday May 29, @07:11PM (1 child)
A better question might be,
How long did you keep your previous mobile phone?
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday May 30, @09:39AM
Not more than 5 years, going by its launch date.
I had not realised how long I had kept my current one. I have already bought the replacement, just not made the time to move over all the data and 'apps'. The replacement is probably obsolescent according to many people.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 02, @10:31AM (2 children)
Back in the day, in Ancient Greece, we had phones, or sounds, but were a little short on the Tele. So the best was to shave the head of a slave, tatoo your text message on the bald head, wait for some hair to grow out enough to encrypt the message, and send him off to the recipient, with instuctions to shave his head again, when he go there. Lost a few long the way, with with highweigh men Making Attica Great Again, and liberty calling. But at least there were no monthly fees!
philoetecles
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 02, @02:27PM (1 child)
First off, you really should learn the difference between cryptography and steganography. You aren't describing encryption at all.
Second, I'm quite certain you personally need an actual mobile phone that's modern enough to work with current cell phone towers. The primary reason is that you want to receive text messages letting you know when your monthly delivery of Bluechew is shipped and when it goes out for delivery. The rest of us also want you to get your Bluechew and to use it more often so that you have better things to do than post low quality comments.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 03, @04:06AM
Haircryptography is not the same a steganography, the art of writing secret messages on bony plated dinosaurs. Did you have an actual criticism, besides deriding my post as "low quality"? Is this the Bleucheu speaking?
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 04, @04:59AM
Dot Dalek has seen fit to close his journal to comments for all but sycophants and Bubbledwellers. Such is Soylent, these days. Less participation is actively being sought. Time to just shut it down.