Does it make sense to upgrade every two years now?

[melte]

I thought the iphone 4s was the last phone I would ever need to buy (stupidly thinking that it could not be bettered!) but I've gone through two phones since then.

For me the key impulses to upgrade would be thinness and camera quality. I love my devices thin and powerful and they get slimmer every year, but I suspect we are at or very near the limits of how thin devices can be. However there should still be some room for ohone cameras to improve further so I guess I will be upgrading when my cycle is up!

 

[Sport Driver]

Ok I have one question, how much do you pay monthly for your phone bill if you are on contract ? How much do you have to pay to get a phone for 1$ ? I live in Slovenia and on contract I pay 20€ (27$)/ per month and when I bought phone this spring (Lumia 820) I payed 260€ ( 357$) for it. So do you pay 80$ per month in US to get phones this cheap ? Here is price for phone same if you pay 46€ (63$).

 

[chris_t]

Romania: 15? for unlimited voice national, unlimited voice international (EU+US+Canada), unlimited text, unlimited data (first 2gbs at 4G speed, 64kbps afterwards). This is a promo Xmas offer, valid for the whole duration of the contract, regular price for this plan being 31?.

For that I got a 520 + screen protector + leather pouch for 0.01?.

Also upgraded my wife"s plan and got an Huawei Ascend P6 for 100?, which I have sold the next day for 300.

That's a good profit, so was worth upgrading. Anyway, I guess I will sell the 520 too and buy an 820/925 off contract, is my first WP and I'm loving it.

Carrier: Cosmote Romania, part of T-Mo group. To be mentioned they are the only Romanian carrier that sell/give away unlocked phones even on contract, Orange & Vodafone are providing sim-lock phones when upgrading contract.

Sent from my Lumia 520 using Tapatalk

 

[Doctor Pork]

yes, run Windows, but I'm not talking about running RT programs. I'm talking PC programs and games. That is the end goal, is it not? People that really enjoy gaming, do not want to be stuck with mobile games for years, just like with desktops we expect generations leaps in graphics every year or two. Doesn't have to be limited to games. What about running a media server to your TV. How do you think our little CPU's and GPU's can stream and transcode HD video and audio? Sure, there are ALOT of things current hardware is sufficient for, but there's equal tasks its not sufficient for, like I mentioned above. If your just gonna browse the internet and play solitaire, you probably haven't needed to upgrade in 10 years, ya know?

I'd love to have my phone act as a media server to my TV/Roku. Then I wouldn't have to consider adding a dedicated Ubuntu PC running XBMC along side. I don't want my gaming rig doing this 24/7.

There is just a ton of things people use PC's for that some people don't even think of. The technology in mobile devices today isn't even close to being sufficient for all of it. I'll put my "old" core 2 Quad Q6700, nVidia GTX560OC against a SoC 800 any day for pure computing power. Beyond that, the only reason that equipment is still managing today's PC games at 1080p is because both my CPU and GPU are overclocked, massively in the case of the CPU (2.66GHz to 3.7GHz).

The Snapdragon is not able to run regular windows programs but that is because it is an ARM CPU and not because it lacks the power, no matter the power it can't run x86 code. Bay trail is significantly more powerful than clover trail and even clover trail which was more in line with the Tegra 3 or Snapdragon S4 was enough to run some more heavy hitting programs but admittedly with some slow downs. One review mentioned doing some simple work in Photoshop on a clover trail hybrid and I certainly had no trouble to get some old games from the beginning of the 2000s to run on mine even if the GPU was the biggest Achilles heel of the Z2760. The current hardware is certainly enough to do some serious work if you can live with that it is not as fast, it is more constrained by lack of RAM and the fact that the more demanding software is compiled for x86. The biggest problem is games, and that is not something that can be solved easily as desktop class gaming is obviously designed for systems with much higher power consumption.