How Samsung turned months of inactivity into a very attention-seeking smartphone

Your spare Android won’t come back to life in a hurry but – like neglected PCs – it really should

Our resident Microsoft-watcher Richard Speed last week wrote about his seven-hour odyssey bringing a Windows 11 box up to snuff with the latest patches.

I’ll see you that struggle, Richard, and raise you my experience updating a 2022-vintage Samsung Galaxy A33 Android smartphone.

I spent about a year using the A33 as my daily driver and while it always did a job, the midrange machine is far from the speediest of smartphones and therefore a little frustrating to use. When a great deal for a premium handset came along I splashed some cash and shelved the A33 as a spare, safe in the knowledge that Samsung has promised to support it with new security updates until 2027.

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I store the A33 in the Basket Full Of Old Tech I Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case, which sits on the floor of my home office – a room that gets no direct sunlight but is small, warm, and dry. All through the mild-if-clammy winter here in The Register’s Sydney, Australia, eyrie, the phone insisted it had moisture in its USB-C port and refused to charge. Because it’s a budget model, topping it up with wireless power isn’t an option.

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Spring has since sprung, so when the mercury topped 30°C (86°F) last weekend I left the phone in a warm and breezy spot for an afternoon. The phantom moisture evaporated, and before long I had the phone charged and running.

Within seconds it suggested installing an OS update from April 2025, followed by six more – each of which required manual consent for download and install.

The A33’s sluggishness soon manifested as an overlapping mess of updates in progress and reboots to finish installation of the last update. Every few minutes, the phone wanted me to approve or schedule a new download, or log back in.

The phone is not so important to me that I needed to get all the updates installed ASAP. Two days of occasional attention at mealtimes and bedtime earned me a slow, old, but functional backup phone.

My experience led me to concur with Mr Speed’s excellent argument that vendors need to ship better software so they’re less reliant on updates – and improve the process of updating devices.

For Samsung that means rolling up past updates into cumulative downloads so leaving a device offline for a few months requires one intervention to modernize a device. The Korean giant could also do well to detect when a handset needs multiple updates and then inform users that its Smart Switch desktop app makes it possible to install cumulative updates in one fell swoop. ®