How Do I Know When My Phone is Dying?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have Samsung Galaxy S4 that I’ve had for about 18 months. Nice phone, have never had a problem with it until recently. For the last threee weeks, it has become slow to respond. Several times now, when I push the “back” icon (lower right), sometimes, nothing happens. At all. I have to restart the phone to get it to respond.

Also, in my email app, I touch an new email to open it, it opens for a second on the screen, then the phone automatically jumps to next email. I have to back out, return to the inbox and re-open the email app.

Is it dying? Is it time to get a new one? (Please, please say “no.”)

2

Well, I don’t think it is dying. It’s more probable that you have a rogue app or two that causes these problems. Maybe you’ve downloaded some new app, or one of your existing apps has got an update that caused it to misbehave.

You can try to find these apps, but usually I find that the easiest solution to these things is to reset the phone and get rid of old junk.

You can use the Kies 3 PC software to backup your contacts and messages and other stuff (like wifi settings) and then do a factory reset on the phone, as described here.