re: Is every new phone as bad as the reviews say they are?

I'm probably sticking with Pixels from here on out. With phones, it's really all about the software. Yeah, some small improvements are through hardware, but it's not going to be enough to affect my day-to-day usage or for most people to even notice unless they're comparing side-by-side. With a Pixel I'm going to be getting updates for the software for a long time, I get a clean OS, I get huge amounts of free cloud storage for photos and the like, it has the best still camera on the market, I'm not paying $1,000 for a device that I'm going to be tossing in a couple of years, and I don't have to deal with Apple's infrastructure.

There's no real downside to them.

Marquis Brownies does a nice, honest assessment of phones. Start with him and whatever phone interests you.

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Bet I’m the only one here that remembers “getting and upgrade” meant actually upgrading to the newest for free or just pennies as long as a new contract was signed.

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Yep. If you upgrade every 1-2 years the difference is pretty negligible in terms of performance.

I used to get a new phone every 2 years but now I go 4 years. I had an s7 edge ($750) for 4 years before moving to the latest s20 FE 5G UW ($700). The difference is very noticeable.

Samsung doesn't do software updates as long as Apple (i believe Apple gives 5 years of updates). So you lose the regular software performance updates after about 3 years, after that there's only going to be major security updates.


Given the cost of smartphones id say minimum of 3 years unless you're just a hobbyist or you've got plenty of money. Otherwise you're just not going to be impressed with the latest incremental upgrades.