What is the longest amount of time a smartphone can keep functioning, assuming it doesn’t get smashed or water damaged? There are no moving parts, but I know that electronics can and do break over time with issues like capacitor failure, oxidation, and tin whiskers.
Often what “goes” is the battery. In the Android world, many models in the past had replaceable batteries so that when the charge capacity began to diminish, it could be replaced. Today, many models don’t have replaceable batteries and when the internal guy starts to become more feeble, that will push you to get a new one. I don’t believe iPhone batteries are consumer replaceable.
If you’re going for a full on smartphone and plan, the hardware itself is cheaper than it used to be. Many carriers have “free phones” - free, that is, when you sign a 2 year contract.
Like all electronic gizmos, or for many it’s cars, hardware enhancements and feature additions provide an arm-twist to push people to replace their phones sooner than might be absolutely necessary. I normally get a new one as soon as my upgrade (with Verizon) is available and I’ve never regretted getting a newer and spiffier model.
Probably the battery is the weak spot. You don’t specify if the cell phone is to be continuously charged, used for many recharge cycles, or just left in a dusty tomb for some adventurer to find far in the future. Lithium ion batteries don’t have an unlimited shelf life but their life is usually measured in cycles rather than what happens if you just leave them. Still, I’ve had devices that failed to turn on after being neglected for a few years. So…somewhere between three and fifteen years, depending on how you treat them, I’d guess.
Lithium ion batteries have a very high energy density, which means you can pack a lot of energy into a small battery. They also are very lightweight, which makes them well suited for any kind of portable device (phone, tablet, laptop, etc).
Unfortunately, their longevity sucks. They begin dying as soon as they are made. Their shelf life isn’t actually all that good. At room temperature, they will lose something like 20 percent of their capacity per year, even if you just leave them on a shelf and don’t ever touch them.
Anything with a non-removable lithium ion battery in it is probably only going to be good for about 4 or 5 years or so. Maybe only 2 or 3 years if the device runs hot, and that heat gets to the battery (heat kills the longevity of lithium ion batteries in a big way).
Consumer electronics in general are typically designed for about a 5 to 7 year lifespan under “normal” use. Military and industrial grade electronics are typically designed with a 15 year intended lifespan, as well as greater operational and storage temperatures. It’s not like every smartphone in the world would suddenly stop working on its 8th birthday, though. What you would find (assuming you’ve got the type that you can replace the battery) is that out of say 100 smartphones, almost all of them will make it to the 5 year mark. Then they start to fail a bit, and after 7 years the failure rate starts to increase. By 10 years, more of them are dead than alive, but you may find a few stragglers still alive after 15 or maybe even 20 years.
I think this one is going to be pretty difficult to answer more precise than “between 3 and 280 years”. There are just too many variables to consider. Is the smartphone supposed to be used during this time? How much will it be used, how will it be used, in what kind of temperatures, climate etc etc.
Here are some thoughts and WAGs:
There are some moving parts in smartphones - there are physical switches for things like volume control and power on/off that will eventually be worn out. There will also be wear and tear on the connectors for charging and for headphones.
Treated well, the first thing to crap out is the battery. With normal use, it’s usually 3-5 years until it becomes inconveniently bad. Less than ten years for it to die completely. You could of course change the battery, or just run it connected to a charger.
The hardware could conceivably go on working for decades and more - but you want it to be functioning, so:
as it gets older, it’s software will no longer be supported and become obsolete - and the hardware will not be powerful enough to run the new stuff - making the smartphone dumber and dumber. It will still function, though - unless the network technology becomes obsolete - and then it’s no longer a phone.
Consumer electronics like smartphones are really not designed to last - any and all support for it will stop after a couple years. After that you can hardly find anyone who can do even the smallest repairs, as you’re expected to buy a new product instead.
This is an estimate of life expectancy for various types of products. It doesn’t really say anything about how long the products actually functions though. I’ve seen figures claiming that about 70-80% of flat screen TVs that got recycled were still in perfect working condition.
I wonder what reader has the oldest functioning phone? I bet theres someone here that has an old times Nokia flip phone or Nextel that still functions.
Here’s my entry - Motorola Timeport (color version of the StarTAC) from December 2000. Pic showing service and current date/time here. It is not associated with a live account, but I just tried making a call on it and got a “Welcome to Verizon Wireless. Please hold while we activate your device…” recording. So it still works. I don’t actually use it - I have a Droid MAXX these days.
I do have a friend who is a bit of a Luddite - he and his girlfriend both still use RAZR V3’s.
My dad still has a working StarTAC from 1996 (it was the first one in Oman!)
Well those flip-phones can be useful longer than a smartphone because you can change the battery, and they don’t have to host a bunch of different software apps or OS upgrades. So it’s sort of a bad comparison when considering how long a phone can be useful.
My mom uses a RAZR just fine, and if I didn’t want a keyboard I’d still be using one too.
It’s not a comparison. russian heel asked a separate question.
I still have my first cell, a Motorola MicroTac 650 that still booted up the last time I charged it, technically you can’t use it as it’s analog.
Former phone designer here.
The battery is one limit if not-replaceable; even if it is you may not be able to get a replacement, as they were made in many, many phone-specific types. The battery is not just a battery, at the very least it also contains a temperature sensor to prevent overheating when charging.
But on my last two phones the failure was purely mechanical. On one the hinged lid broke so its little magnet could not trigger the hall-efffect switch to turn it on. It was a flimsy bit of plastic doomed to fail eventually.
One the other the disc covering the important tact switches broke. I can work them with my thumbnail but it’s not easy. New phone time…
Like many designers I studiously avoid the bleeding edge of any product. Will I get a smart phone? Hmmmm.
Screens, especially touch-screens, tend to have a much shorter life-span that most of the other electronics in a phone.
I think the screen on a smart phone will be the first non-moving part after the battery to go.
Reading an xda-developers forum for one of my tablets suggest the two most common hardware help categories are battery and screen related. Although many of the questions about the later are apparently damage related: drops, spills, etc. as opposed to general wear-and-tear.
How long will a touch screen last? If you store the phone carefully and never use it, maybe two+ decades, I’m guessing. Everyday use: much less than ten for sure.
There’s also a question of what you mean by functioning, Spectrum is limited, and so cell providers sometimes get to a point where they have few enough users on an older technology that they get rid of it and re-use the frequency for something better.
So if you were using a smartphone that got it’s data connection over 3G HSPA in the 1700 MHz band, and your provider decided to re-farm that band for use in higher-speed LTE, when they do that, your phone might not get a data connection anymore, even though all the buttons, the battery, whatever are fine.
My gut is that there’s a better than 50% chance that 30 years from now, if there’s no physical damage (from being dropped, etc) and if you’ve got a new battery or are powering the phone’s electronics with a DC power supply, I think the phone would still work. That is, you’d be able to power it up, access all the apps that don’t require external data, and if you had the phone in a shielded room with a small cell tower from this era, it would be able to communicate with that tower.
It would probably still be useless - about half of desktop PCs from 1985 probably still power up, assuming you replace the hard drives, fans, and power supplies. 1985 desktop PCs sometimes even had modems - there is just no online service they would be compatible with. Except if they were running Linux and using the terminal, actually…
Capacitive touchscreens have no particular wearout mechanism that I know of.
Maximum lifespan for my wife’s smartphones: 6 months…max. Oy.
Hm, rummaged in our old electronics drawer. All the run of Treos work, my Moto M in bright red with the music package - wonder if that funky behind the head bluetooth headset would work with my laptop…, and I am still using my first gen Droid as we speak. Also all my old PDAs still work. So pretty much all my little toys from about 1995 forward work or at least power up.
Hm, both Amigas work [1000, 500] I would try my first PC which was a custom build but it already became an organ donor to several others. With the exception of the laptop that the cat peed into I have some 8 or 9 laptops that work, we each have a current desktop though I rarely use mine [I use it as a bedroom entertainment center and listen to music or watch DVDs on it, we don’t have a TV in the bedroom.]
mrAru on the other hand needs a replacement droid 2 - his got some sort of screen damage so there is a thin vertical stripe of funky looking whatever is on the screen, and the touch screen function is slightly off. Phone still works just fine. We replaced the batteries in both last summer and so we averted the battery death =)
Precious few PC-compatibles from 1985 would be capable of running Linux. At least in its original incarnation, Linux required an Intel 386 processor, and while these processors were introduced in late 1985, they didn’t really become widely available until the following year.
That said, plenty of home computers from the 1980s (and maybe even the 1970s), PC-compatible or otherwise, are perfectly capable of connecting to the Internet using SLIP or PPP over a dial-up connection. For instance, it’s possible to get a stock Commodore 64 online with Novaterm.
My oldest smartphones is 11 years, oldest other phone is a Microtac from I think 1995.
I don’t really count bad batteries as the end of life. Until a few years ago I always counted on replacing a battery at least once. My 11 year old phone had 2 batteries that both still work, though.