Replacement Razr Maxx Performs Better than Original?

[sr1sws]

I had a Razr Maxx for about 1 year. About March of this year it was upgraded to Jelly Bean. Subsequent to that I did a factory reset and re-installed the apps I was using, etc. Over time, I felt the phone was getting slower and slower. Periodically I'd boot into recovery and clear the cache, terminate unused applications, etc. The usual stuff to keep performance up. Nothing seemed to make a lot of difference.

This past Saturday I 'drowned' my Razr in the hot tub. I wasn't coming back, so I paid my deductible to Asurion and got a replacement.

I promptly set the replacement up the same as the original - at least to the best of my knowledge. To my surprise, the replacement phone seems to be noticeably faster than the original. Neither phone was rooted nor running a custom ROM.

This puzzles me and I'd sure like to keep the feeling. In spite of being an IT techie, I can't quite fathom "why" the new phone would be faster than the old - especially on JB.

Any clues or thoughts? I'd like to be able to keep this new phone feeling.

Thanks for any insight!
Steve

 

[B. Diddy]

I wonder about this myself, as I've read other similar comments. There are, of course, the conspiracy theorists who think the wireless companies or phone manufacturers are purposely making the phones slow down over time so that you buy another one. I'm not an engineer, but perhaps it might have to do with how memory circuits can degrade over time with use? SD cards and solid state drives certainly have a lifespan in terms of read-write cycles, so perhaps that's what's happening to the internal RAM/ROM for our phones? If there are any hardcore engineers out there, feel free to chime in, and definitely tell me if I'm way off base about this!

 

[sr1sws]

Yeah, I don't think it's the flash memory wearing out. Definitely not on the external SD, because the new phone has the old card in it.

I lean more towards "clutter/chaos" or software issues... but then someone should know/discover that and come up with a slick fix.

Thoughts?

 

[B. Diddy]

Right, but I would imagine that the external SD is used much less frequently than the internal storage, so the latter is probably going through many more read-write cycles than the former. If it were a clutter/chaos issue, then factory resets should fix it.