Trying to decide whether to get a new phone…

Since June 2014, I’ve had this: a Samsung Galaxy S4. It’s served me well. It’s already lasted me almost twice as long as my previously longest-lived phone (that’d be a Samsung Galaxy S3 that lasted 20 months). The camera hasn’t broken, which it did on my S3 – the glass on the lens shattered. It still works.

But it just feels old. The battery runs out after about 90 minutes of solid use. Last year when I was on placement, there were times I left it on silent in my bag all day, and found it at about 5% battery by the end (even though it had been at 90%+ in the morning). I’m guessing that was a bug that’s been fixed because I haven’t seen that lately, but it did drain from about 70% to 10% during a day on the Mornington Peninsula when I wasn’t using it, seemingly from overexerting itself trying to get a signal. Basically, the battery life is a bit crap.

And OK, I could buy a new battery. But the device is also really laggy. Just scrolling through Twitter is stuttery. If I press a notification, the relevant app will regularly take 20+ seconds to appear (often long enough that I try to open it again). Sometimes my alarm to wake up in the morning just doesn’t go off (as in, the phone decided to kill the Clock app/process overnight because it deemed some other background process more important). Sometimes the lag is so bad that the “accept call” screen doesn’t even appear until the call’s already timed out! Thankfully this hasn’t happened yet with any calls from the agency I get work through, but it totally could one day. As if the prospect of sleeping through my alarm wasn’t bad enough.

( Cut because this got really long and self-indulgent. )