Three weeks ago, in the middle of sending a message, the phone I'd been using for the last eight years suddenly stopped working. It was not broken, had not crashed, and still had plenty of charge on the battery. Instead, a message from my phone network informed me that it had shut off support for 3G, meaning I could no longer make calls, send texts or use mobile data.
I was annoyed at first. Despite using it without a case for its entire life, there was no physical damage to the phone, and it still worked for everything I needed a phone for – albeit a bit slowly at times. It felt like a form of planned obsolescence, even though it was not necessarily the fault of the manufacturer.
But as I turned to my laptop to find out why my phone network had done this (it turns out Ofcom had set a deadline for all UK networks to turn off 3G by the end of 2025), I began to feel a vague sense of accomplishment – like seeing the ink run dry on a trusty Bic biro.
I'd used the phone for all its worth, and while it still looked like a phone, it no longer functioned as one.
Now I'm left with the problem of how to replace it. Unfortunately, there is no longer an equivalent to the Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact: a flagship smartphone that comes in a small size. Its 4.6-in display makes modern phones look like tablets, with both Samsung's Galaxy S25 Ultra and Apple's iPhone 17 Pro Max featuring screens measuring 6.9 inches..
Even the smallest offerings from the big phone makers are still a minimum of 6 inches, despite Steve Jobs once saying that big phones were not the future. "You can't get your hand around it," he said in 2010. "No one's going to buy that."
Also, with the amount of e-waste at this time of year, buying a new phone feels a bit like getting a dog from a puppy farm for Christmas. And while tossed out tech is nothing like a discarded pet, buying refurbished electronics could be like adopting a dog from a shelter.
A dog is not for the whole of your life, but it should be for the whole of theirs. And my old Sony shows that despite the yearly upgrade cycle, a smartphone need not be just for Christmas – it can last until the end of its life. So I'm going to adopt one, refurbished. It might not save a life, but it will save a device.
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