With new flagships releasing almost every year, there’s always a new device on the market up for grabs that come at a variety of different price points and with a host of different hardware or software upgrades – whether a new device is in store to take advantage of the latest hardware features aimed at social media users, for the latest gaming features that help players improve at games of chance at casino genie right through to more competitive titles, or even devices that provide a better work flow, is it time for a smartphone upgrade to get these features or are users better off waiting?
(Image from theverge.com)
The first step is to identify exactly what the usage of the new device will be – there’s no use looking for a phone that’s going to improve gaming performance if the hardware changes don’t support this and upgrades are instead aimed at different features – often times a device that’s a year or two old will have little discernable difference from a brand new device and changing won’t impact performance, it’ll just take a sizeable chunk out of the wallet instead.
Secondly will be keeping an eye on tech news for what can be expected in the future – if the newest release has much of the same tech internally then tech news may have some insights to what may be coming the year after whether it be a new processing chip, bigger and better displays, or changes to the battery and how it performs – skipping a year to wait for these new bits of hardware isn’t a bad decision and much like the first step can save a pretty penny too, but is also important to know what to look out for in order to avoid the hype around a hardware change that may not be all it’s made out to be.
Finally comes the question of price too – most modern smartphones are well past the $1,000 mark and some are even approaching $2,000 for a new phone depending on its novelty as flip and fold phones have pushed the barrier here – ultimately, it’s the question of how much an upgrade is valued – if the upgrade is simply a change to the camera technology, is the cost of making the change over the phones lifespan valued the same? Many users are holding onto their older devices for a longer period of time for this very reason as it’s not uncommon to see three- or four-year-old smartphones in regular use without seeing any performance hit, and price has a lot to do with this. New doesn’t always mean better in the current smartphone life cycle, and whether or not it’s time for a smart phone upgrade has become a very grey area.
