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It occurred to me today that as of Monday, I've been using my current smartphone--the Samsung Galaxy Note 8--for four and a half years. That is quite a bit longer than I expected to use it; I'd used my previous smartphone for three and a half years, and it was in pretty bad shape by the time I retired it. My Note 8 certainly isn't in mint condition: its battery life has been reduced to about 24 hours of standby time, its body has many scratches and scuffs, and its screen has noticeable burn-in from the keyboard and on-screen navigation buttons (a featured I always disliked). The software on the phone, however, runs quite well, and the phone shows no apparent slowdown.
I've owned four smartphones so far. The first was the Apple iPhone 3GS, which my parents bought for me in March 2011 after I had owned a Motorola Razr v3. In retrospect, it's a little strange to think that I owned a flip phone from the early 2000s at at time when the iPhone 4 had already been released. I loved my Razr, though, and at first I wasn't sure if I was even interested in owning a smartphone.
I used the iPhone for 20 months, from March 2011 to November 2012. My second smartphone--the HTC Vivid (also known as the HTC Raider)--only lasted 19 months, until June 2014. The next smartphone after that was the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which lasted me exactly three and a half years, until I purchased the Note 8 in December 2017.
I hadn't intended to use the Note 8 for so long--at first I didn't even want one, preferring to get a Note 7 FE instead. For perspective, I've now been married for four years, and I got the Note 8 while I was still engaged. The smartphone with which I intend to replace it is F(x)tec's Pro1 X, which was supposed to ship in March 2021 but has faced many manufacturing problems over the last year and a half. I still plan to use the Pro1 X as my next phone, so until it ships, I will stay with the Note 8.
Looking forward, I wonder if I will end up using the Pro1 X for as long as the Note 8. The Pro1 X is meant to be open moddable, shipping with an unlocked bootloader and official ports of LineageOS and Ubuntu Touch. I wouldn't be surprised if the device eventually gets community ports of Sailfish OS and postmarketOS as well. It's likely the Pro1 X will get software and security updates for longer than the Note 8 did--I still get security patches every now and then, but the base OS has been on Android Pie since 2019.
It remains to seen how the hardware will hold up, though. I might need to get rid of the smartphone in less than two years, like the Vivid, or it may serve me faithfully for a half-decade or more like the Note 8. Only time will tell.
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[Last updated: 2022-06-30]