Phone Upgrade Reluctance

Lately, I’ve been having a problem with my smartphone.  It’s getting old and, as phones tend to do, the battery has been acting up.  I’ll go from 80% battery charge to 50% to 20% with little real use.  Once the battery drops, it will take a long time to go back up from 20%, but will sometimes leap to 100% from much lower.  Clearly my phone is dying and is in need of an upgrade.

Luckily for me, my wife is a member of the Verizon Lifestyle Bloggers and has a nice collection of phones she has reviewed.  This means that upgrading isn’t a matter of being able to afford a new phone.  You would think that I’d jump at the upgrade chance.  Since I use the name TechyDad, I should be ready to drop the old tech and upgrade, right?

So why am I so reluctant?

It might seem like a minor thing, but the answer is games.

It isn’t that I can’t get my favorite games on a new phone.  In fact, I’d likely be able to play the games for longer before the battery drained and without as many slowdowns.  However, since game progress is stored on the phone in most cases, my progress in many games would be completely erased.  This isn’t a problem for some games.  I really don’t care too much if I need to start Angry Birds: Star Wars or Cut the Rope over again.  However, I’d hate to see My Muppets Show or Doctor Who: Legacy reverted back to the beginning.  Especially because I’ve collected a few items in both that were only available for a limited time.

B has said that I can keep the old phone for my games as a Wi-Fi only device and this is true, but what if I want to play a quick game while I’m out?  Maybe I have a few minutes to kill and want to collect coins from my Muppet performers or I want to kill a few Daleks in Doctor Who: Legacy.  I would either need to carry my "gaming phone" around with me along with my new phone (and hope I could connect to Wi-Fi) or I’d be out of luck.

(Quick Note: Doctor Who: Legacy now uses Google Cloud Saving which might help this situation.  Still, I’m not sure whether Google Cloud Saving would restore to a new device.  Even if it did, other apps don’t use this.)

Ideally, I’d like to be able to back up my game save data and transfer that to a new device.  Unfortunately, this can be tricky and, in my initial research, often requires that your device be rooted.  Not that I’m against rooting, but it’s more the principle of the thing.  There should be an option to save your data in a manner that is easily transferable to another device.

Have you ever moved data such as game progress from one phone to another one?  If so, what did you use?

NOTE: The image above is "The Incredible Javascript Android Phone Browser" by filtre.  It is available via OpenClipArt.org.