9 signs its time to upgrade to a new phone

The question “Should I buy a new phone?” holds more weight than we imagine. For most of us, phones are our trusted associates, and parting with them isn’t easy. For others, the upgrade to a new phone may be too insignificant to warrant the expense. Regardless of the emotional value your phone holds, getting a new one every few years can be a cathartic experience. Besides addressing some of the issues of your older phone, a new Android phone will bring a variety of new features.

While a new phone may not hold the answer to all your life problems, it may end some of the trivial ones. Here are the signs that indicate it might be time to upgrade to a new one.

One of the first tell-tale signs that your phone is in dire need to be replaced is when it gets unreasonably hot. Heating, as a sign of your phone’s old age, becomes even more pertinent when it happens excessively, even during basic activities such as calling or without any apparent load — as while gaming or fast charging.

This usually indicates that your phone’s hardware may be old enough and feeling choked with the requirements of newer apps or a modern operating system.

While you feel the phone heat up unjustifiably, you might even witness it lag in daily operations. This happens because most silicon-based semiconductors are only designed to operate within a specific temperature range. When chips heat beyond a certain point, the algorithms coded onto the board limit performance to reduce the heat, and this phenomenon is known as “throttling.”

In practical usage, throttling manifests as a jittery response when content on the screen refreshes or when you interact with the screen. Alternatively, a laggy screen could also suggest a physical problem with the screen itself.

A new screen could be a stopgap solution — only if you’re lucky enough to find a replacement screen for an old phone.

Aging phones are often characterized by random instances of the screen becoming unresponsive, which is likely an extension of the previous point I mentioned. When that happens, the phone might resort to restarting itself — or require you to restart it. But either condition points to hardware problems that would not emerge on new devices — except in rare cases like that of the Sony Xperia 1 VII, and is a prominent sign that you should consider ditching the old phone.

Sometimes, random reboots can also signal a software issue with the phone, which may be easier to resolve. That is why it’s a good idea to look for other signs that suggest it’s time for a new phone.

It’s an established fact that lithium-ion batteries, which are also present inside our phones, degrade over time. Each charging cycle reduces the battery’s ability to hold electric charge. In simpler terms, we refer to this loss of ability as a reduction in battery capacity.

While Android phones get relatively less flak than iPhones for degrading batteries, they’re not entirely immune to such changes. If you tend to use the same phone for several years, you will have likely noticed the battery health decline beyond a certain level — as on my iPhone 11 above.

A degraded battery naturally lasts shorter than when it, and the phone, were new. While iOS already offers easy visibility to battery health stats, Google has started adding similar information to newer Pixel devices, starting Pixel 9 series, running Android 16. You can use this information to decide if you might need to upgrade to a new phone.

While there are several reasons why your phone may be charging slowly, a weathered battery is definitely one of them. If you have experienced your phone’s charging speed slow down over time, it’s easy to attribute it to its age, especially if the decline is gradual.

In such a case, you might want to bless your old phone with a new battery — if buying a new phone isn’t an option. However, if your device is old, physically battered, and shows a few of the other signs listed here, you should just upgrade to a new phone.

If you’ve followed the world of smartphones for a while, “batterygate” would ring a bell. If you haven’t, this was the title given to a fiasco resulting from Apple’s purposeful slowing down of the performance of iPhone 6 and 6s phones to reduce the impact of their aging batteries. The uproar led to Apple offering a $50 payout to impacted consumers in the US and making this throttling optional. While Apple’s actions were widely criticized, they had a vital purpose of preventing fires or sparking issues while charging those devices.

In some instances, as with the more recent Pixel 6a, the company may issue an update to limit the battery’s capacity in response to a manufacturing defect. In a rare occasion like that, you would likely be eligible for compensation or a discount voucher — as you are in the case of the Pixel 6a (check here) — and you could use those benefits to treat yourself to a new phone instead of taking your chances trying to resuscitate the older one.

Our phones have limited lifespans, which are often defined by the software support promised for these devices. Most Android phone manufacturers offer two to three years of Android updates, along with some additional years of security updates. If you have a recent Samsung or Google phone, you’ll enjoy up to seven years of updates.

But what happens when your phone stops receiving updates? It may be less bothersome when your phone stops receiving Android updates, and the worst that could happen is that you’re stuck with an older appearance and some outdated features on your phone. However, it’s more concerning when your phone stops receiving security updates, making it an easier target for sophisticated cyberattacks than phones that still receive those updates.

While it’s not the end of the world, you should consider getting a new phone if your current one stops getting updates, and safeguard yourself against online attacks.

One of the first signs of aging my trusty old OnePlus 3T showed me was an unusual pink hue take over the entire screen. I hadn’t dropped the phone and could easily overrule physical damage to the screen. Being over five years old at that point, I didn’t bother changing the screen, though I held onto it for its sentimental value. I just switched to a new phone.

More recently, the screen has turned fully opaque, signalling its death, convincing me I was right to replace the phone at the right moment. And that is what I would recommend anyone to do if the screen on their old phone stops showing its actual colors.

Solid cellular and internet connectivity are fundamental requirements for a phone. However, as networks continue to upgrade, radios on older phones may not be compatible. This is especially true if there has been a significant leap in network technology since you first owned a phone. For instance, if your current phone does not support 5G or is limited to the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi band, that’s a good reason to upgrade to more recent hardware.

We expect the next generation of 5G, known as 5G Advanced, to arrive soon and foresee tri-band Wi-Fi becoming commonplace. When either of those happens, older devices from the early era of 5G or dual-band Wi-Fi may not suffice, prompting you to upgrade to a new phone.

Do you have any other indicators to help you determine when the right time to upgrade to a new phone is? Share your thoughts in the comments below!