Weekly poll: how long do you plan to keep your current phone?

Six years ago, we asked you “how often do you change your phone?”. The most common answer back then was once every three years, with once every two years coming in a close second. So, if the statistics hold up, most of you reading this have changed your phone two or three times since 2020.

But back then AI was just a curiosity. No one could have predicted the effect it would have on RAM and storage prices in just a few years. Yet here we are in a time when the prices of phones go up instead of down after they launch.

Okay, if we look past the doom-and-gloom state of the memory market, we’ll see some positive changes too. Phones with 6 or 7 years of OS updates are quite common now, while they were quite rare back then. Such a level of support was nigh impossible for anything without an Apple logo on the back.

Chipset performance, battery capacity and image sensor capabilities keep improving every year – these are normally incentives to swap your old phone for a new one. That said, some people feel that we’ve hit a point of diminishing returns – an old phone remains “good enough” for several years.

On the flip side, the rapid advancement of technologies like Si/C batteries, 2nm chips, LOFIC image sensors, Privacy Displays, foldable designs and so on makes it that much more tempting to pick up a new phone. This way you will enjoy the cutting edge features now instead of a few years from now.

Here’s what we want to ask this week – how long do you plan to keep your current phone? One or two years, maybe more?

We want to try something a little different this time, since the answer very much depends on whether you have a flagship, a mid-range or an entry-level phone.

The poll this week has three questions – one for each category. Use the “I don’t have an X” to skip the question in the categories that are not relevant to you and pick the answer for the one that is.