Do You Really Need A New Phone?

Should you get a new phone for you or others in your family?

It would be nice to have new phone with a shiny box, but it may not be necessary and may not eliminate phone issues.

You’ve had your Android/iPhone for a few years, but lately It’s been getting glitchy. Overall your smartphone is sluggish and performance has dropped significantly.

For example, initially your phone took great pictures. But now error messages are popping up when you try take a picture. You may be getting messages letting you know updates are available, but you can’t install them. There is not enough space.

The problem could be that your phone doesn’t have anything inherently wrong with it, it could just be running out of storage space. And this is a relatively simple issue to resolve.

When you consider a new smartphone can runs upwards of $2,000, you may be looking for other options rather than purchasing a new phone.

What are your options?

Both the iPhone and Android phones have the option of adding cloud storage, so you don’t run out of space on your phone. If your phone gets lost or stolen, your photos are backed up to the cloud and can be restored with your user name and password that was set up on the old phone.

A word of caution…
Make sure you know your username and password for your phone and accounts before doing anything. If you change your username or password, you will not be able to access your photos and other data that are stored in the cloud. Knowing just your PIN number does not replace knowing the username and password.

Another thing to keep in mind…if your files are only stored in the cloud, they are not backed up. This goes along with the rule that if your data is stored in only one location, it’s not backed up. So ideally, you will have your your data stored in the cloud AND you will have an external hard drive to back up your data AND your data will also be stored elsewhere. For example Google Drive.

iCloud Options
Free: 5GB of storage per iCloud account (not per device)
$0.99/month: 50GB of storage (single user)
$2.99/month: 200GB of storage (family use)
$9.99/month: 2TB of storage (family use) Mar 22, 2022

Click here to learn more about iCloud storage options.

Android Options
Free: 15 GB that is shared across Google Drive, Gmail and Google Photos.

Click here to learn more about Google Plan/Android options.

Other options for storage that you may already be paying for through other memberships are Amazon Prime or Microsoft OneDrive:

Amazon Prime

As you can see, regardless of the plan you choose, it’s much less expensive to purchase cloud storage rather than potentially spending thousands of dollars on new smartphones. And you could still run into the same issues if the new phone can’t access enough storage in your Android/iPhone cloud account.

As I mentioned previously, while these locations hold your files and photos, they are not considered “backups” by themselves. Cloud storage locations can (and do) go down. They are not responsible for your data.

On the good side, you probably have one or more of these you are paying for without realizing it. I use the additional storage options to back my cloud data to multiple cloud locations. In case one cloud location goes down, I haven’t lost anything that can’t be recovered from another location.

Give us a call at 615-443-4842 so we can do a free analysis of your systems to make sure everything is running smooth and secure.

All the best and stay well,
Jim Nay