Why we test on an old phone too

One of our three test phones is genuinely ancient, and we keep it on purpose. Plenty of readers aren't upgrading every year, and a game that only sings on flagship hardware isn't the whole story.

You learn a lot watching a game struggle. Load times balloon, animations stutter, and some titles quietly get worse to play even if they technically run. That's information a spec sheet won't give you.

Puzzle and casual games have an advantage here, since they rarely need much power. But some pile on particle effects and heavy backgrounds that add nothing to the puzzle and everything to the battery drain.

When a game runs smoothly on the old phone, I make a point of saying so, because that reliability is a real feature. Tilewell and Lantern Logic both passed without complaint, which quietly raised my opinion of them.

So if a review here mentions performance, know it's not from a lab. It's from actually watching a real, tired old handset try to keep up, the same way many of you will.