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Do Specs Matter Anymore For the Average Smartphone User?
ourlovecanlastforeve writes: While reviewing a recent comparison of the Nexus 5 and the iPhone 6, OSNews staffer Thom Holwerda raises some relevant points regarding the importance of specs on newer smartphones. He observes that the iPhone 6, which is brand new, and the Nexus 5 launch apps at about the same speed. Yes, they're completely different platforms and yes, it's true it's probably not even a legitimate comparison, but it does raise a point: Most people who use smartphones on a daily basis use them for pretty basic things such as checking email, casual web browsing, navigation and reminders. Those who use their phones to their maximum capacity for things like gaming are a staunch minority. Do smartphone specs even matter for the average smartphone user anymore? After everyone releases the biggest phone people can reasonably hold in their hand with a processor and GPU that can move images on the display as optimally as possible, how many other moons are there to shoot for?
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
I have to wear specs to read anything on my smartphone these days.
The iPhone 6 has a better battery life and camera than the Nexus 5, which is probably more important to most customers. In that regard the newly-release Sony Z3 is the best phone on the market.
Waiting till all phones are IP68 rated so I can drop it dunny, wipe it off on my dusty trousers and go back to the bar without a care.
That's the only thing people care about. Get it to work for more than 10hours
Just like PCs what matters has shifted.
On the desktop speed is becoming less important while video is becoming slightly more important thanks to GPU compute being used for transcoding video and of course games.
Laptops cpu speed is less important than display quality, graphics performance, battery life, and weight.
Oh phones it is really all about the screen and battery life for most people.
CPUs right now are fast enough for majority of people. Of course there are users that need the fastest CPU, GPU and so on and others that need the lowest possible power draw.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Smartphones are very good currently. Within the next year or two, I think they'll have mostly caught up with desktop PCs for casual and office-type tasks. So currently specs MOSTLY matter if you're a hardcore phone gamer, doing something like running a bitcoin miner on your phone, or are WAY behind the curve (like me). But in the reasonably near future, there are only going to be a couple of specs that matter: How fast is the mobile connection? How long does the battery last? How big is the screen?
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Taking the article-s premise as correct for the moment - it's certainly plausible - that might imply that we're entering a phase where the technological improvements in smartphones aren't used to cram more silicon in there at higher clock speeds, but to keep us on an even keel and improve battery life. There were whiffs of this at Apple's last event - the focus on the 20nm process and improved APIs over raw performance - and there would be precident. Remember about five years ago when laptops were suddenly "fast enough" and typical battery life ballooned from one or two hours to six or eight?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The specs that matter to me are things like battery life, external storage (Micro SD Card) support and durability. These are things that many manufacturers seem to not be focusing on. They'd rather shave another 0.2 mm off the phone just so they could say it's thinner than last year, as opposed to leaving those 0.2mm on an maybe have better battery life, or be able to make the thing waterproof or add functions that really matter to me. I know battery life has gotten a lot better, but the way I see it, we could have a phone that lasted through 3 or 4 days of actual use if they just would have stopped trying to make it thinner once they hit the 1cm mark. And I will never buy a phone that doesn't support SD cards. (or whatever the popular form of removable media is in the future).
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
... get over your fucking phone. It's a convenient electronic bauble, not the center of your fucking existence.
They never mattered to the average user...
People care mostly about features. Cameras are good enough for most people, but some are faster than others and have things like optical stabilization and batter automatic settings / post processing. As far as performance helps this stuff, it matters.
Other specs I'm sad to say don't seem to matter much. The iPhone 6 has a very low resolution screen for a high end phone, with pretty much everyone else at that size being 1080p now. Yet, it doesn't seem to matter... Not because you can't see the difference, because you can, but because people buy it more for the fact that it is an iPhone than because of the spec. On Android it matters, on iPhone I suppose you don't really have a choice.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There is still room to improve usability and other features, not just specs. Look at ApplePay for example. Mobile payment options have been around on Android but nobody uses them. Apple will do nominally the same "feature" but they'll get it right, make it usable, push it into mainstream.
There's still room for that. For refinement, providing things in ways people want them. It's not all about TehSpecs.
Yes. Specs do matter. If the hardware is bottlenecked in anything the OS really needs: Anybody remember those CD drives that locks the system IO while attempting to read? Or what it felt like going from a HDD to a SSD?
There is also a few slashdot articles about significant app launch gain by using a faster SD card over the internal storage, due shitty design
And yet, the answer should be:
No: We should already be past the issue. And software should have solved the issue long time ago. Browsers should almost expect to be used on some of the early Android devices, and then take advantage of any speedup. And more.
The next big moon to shoot for is to maintain the current performance, but dramatically increase battery life. There hasn't been a battery breakthrough in years. The good thing is that if batteries get better for phones, our entire electronic world will improve. Or if a breakthrough happens in some other industry, it will come back into phones.
There will always be applications for which more computing power is desirable, but the issue is most applications, for most users. I can use all the CPU time you give me to generate data, but I use a 7-year-old, then-£400 laptop to write up the results into a paper.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Comm specs matter.
It's kind of hard to use a GSM phone on a CDMA network, or vice versa. Internet dependence on EDGE vs. UTMS vs. LTE? Also kind of matters. 802.11a vs. 802.11n/g also kind of matters.
how many other moons are there to shoot for?
Battery life. Never ending battery life.
Keep all the specs as they are now. Work on extending battery life _only_ for the next 2 years. That'll be the next killer "feature" (which is ironic, as phones from 10-15 years ago always had a battery life of 3+ days).
If there is going to be one feature that will be added to smartphones, please let it be longer battery life?
The experience does.
When the experience is good, specs don't matter.
When someone has a bad experience or sees someone else have a better experience they lack, then specs matter.
For example, I'm going to assume resolution is going to stop mattering with the 6+ having 1080p (surely 4k/8k will be superfluous here, right?), until phones can emit 3D holograms. But they can work on other metrics till then like contrast and sunlight readability.
1. Battery life. This is a biggie. It can be the fastest thing in the universe, but if it dies after 2 hours, it's not going to be fast at doing much of anything.
2. Storage. Modern Android phones still only generally come with 32GB of storage, and adding SD cards only partially solves the problem (if your phone can even take them). If you truly want to keep everything on your phone, this will become small in short order. The "cloud" is not the answer as long as carriers are overcharging for limited LTE plans and free wifi coverage is limited. It's best if everything synchs when you are somewhere with fast WiFi. Photos and Videos in particular take a lot of space. As newer phones get faster, people start loading them with things like PSP emulator game images, etc. that are hundreds of megabytes each. More space can almost always be useful in the sense that caching downloads can save data and increase speed. Maps is a good example.
3. Memory and decent Multitasking. Memory is necessary for multitasking. Decent multitasking is tricky on a phone because multitasking can kill the battery that much faster, and yet having things like Skype work reliably for incoming calls requires some kind of real multitasking. Multitasking is not that necessary on a phone because we all have computers, but to the extent that tablets and phones replace desktop or laptop computers in the future, the ability to display multiple applications at once will become more useful - especially if you plug your phone into a docking station at home and use it on a big monitor. For example, you might want to watch the news on the top half of the screen while you chat with your friend on the bottom half.
You misunderstand. The OP said it does not matter for average user. Just like Gaming PC with i7 vs PC with celeron. Or toyota vs BMW. Sure there is a need for faster computers and phones (for viewing 3d scans ) but for most of us a Toyota is just fine
When it was a question of phone, it was mostly Nokias that were inexpensive, worked well, battery held up days. Then we had the SMS craze that gave us better screens and a better keyboard. These were purchased mostly for weight and for look, like a jewelry piece. They lasted years until someone grew tired of it, after the 3rd battery change.
Now, the best correlation would be the computer industry. In the 90s, a computer would last 3 years until a major paradigm shift and a break to a much better CPU/GPU/HDD. Now, the Average Joe doesn't need the latest greatest 3K$ computer, (s)he can take a 1K$ computer and be happy for years with it.
The phone industry gets there slowly too. There are major speed advances, miniaturization, optimizations, and a phone you'd be tempted to change every year doesn't need to be changed anymore at such breakneck speed, however the industry is still improving with users demanding even more, so we're not there yet. My iPhone 4 still works relatively well, although it shows its age by not running the latest apps as fast as a new phone can. It's more than 10x slower than the current 6 in most categories, and apps are getting to use that speed. My battery life is 2 days of normal use, however, it drains quickly if I start to connect to Facebook or Safari, or other heavy-duty modern applications. But I just look at my wife's 4S and it's leaps beyond by 4, and it's merely a year later ... We could probably keep it 1-2 more years, or even more, depending on what the modern apps expect of the phone.
I'm giving the iPhone as example. This applies to any given phone that's using 3rd party tools and apps. I noticed the upgrade pace is slowing in users. You need a real shift in order to get a user to switch these days, where it was ridiculous _not_ to shift every year 3-4-5 years ago.
... the devices don't do much.
When the technology goes airborne, and starts performing miracles of a semi-religious nature, it's all about what it can DO.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
And we all know that it's much easier to build yet another crappy app than it is to fix the bugs and security problems in the existing ones. Most "programmers" suck.
Nobody's saying that innovation should stop, just that CPU is "good enough".
Faster CPU is not the only possible innovation, and not increasing CPU speed does not mean "status quo". If the CPU is fast enough for mainstream users, innovation can apply to other aspects that people actually care about, like camera quality, battery life, voice quality, data speed, waterproofing, improved functionality, screen quality, ... you name it!
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Exactly. There is very little reason for most people to go out and spend $700 on a phone. Yet we just saw it happen. 10 million people went out and bought a $700 phone in one day. People really perplex me sometimes. I'm starting to shop for my next phone, as my payoff period is coming up on my current phone, and the ones I'm looking at are all $200 or less. It doesn't really seem like you get anything much from the $700 phone as compared to the $200 phone.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Battery life and user experience are the goals. My Motorola X has the best user experience I have had. Far better than the iphone 4s and Samsung s4. Both Google and Apple have the cloud integration (not sure about Microsoft as I have not tested). I expect automotive electronics will augment or replace some of the smartphone mobile functions.
I couldn't help but notice the most adamant spec warriors in my group carefully avoided the topic of Apple's A7 processor when it was released. Whatever one things of Apple's design and pricing schemes the A7 was notable achievement that advanced specs in a direction unexpected by its competitors and which really hasn't been equaled to date. Yet for some reason it wasn't discussed.
Leads me to believe that there is something else involved in the chest pounding contest besides straightforward performance measures...
sPh
I recently switched from Verizon to Cricket to save some money and went from a Galaxy S4 to a Galaxy Express. The S4 was snappy, no lag opening apps, unlocked right away and so on. The Express would often lag switching apps or even unlocking the screen. When I had it synced via bluetooth with my car stereo and I would skip a song, it would take 3 or 4 seconds to actually skip, where the S4 was instantaneous. I know it seems petty, but when you're used to speed, it's hard to go back. I ended up biting the bullet and getting a Nexus 5. Life is good again.
I think Louis C.K. said it best:
"People say 'My phone sucks.' No it doesn't. The shittiest cell phone in the world is a miracle. Your life sucks, around the phone."
Since most sites are blocked at work, here's theoatmeal drawing of it.
Because your e-mail loads equally fast doesn't mean mine does (I have 10k+ messages in my inbox). Because you use your phone for simple games, doesn't mean I don't use it for viewing 3D brain scans.
You sound exactly like the average user the article is talking about.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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Though obviously through iOS updates push designed obsolescence to the older phones, clearly I'd be better served by an iPhone 5, but for me, what matters more than specs?
Functionality.
Which is why the contract-free HTC Desire always beats out the iPhone for me, and why the latter is essentially an MP3 player now. Though most of that is Apple's fault.
Funny, how placing a phone CALL isn't even considered one of the "pretty basic things" a smartPHONE user does anymore.
I actually sat down and thought about this, and I think software obsolescence is a big factor. Apple supports phones with new OS releases for four years. (Which is nice by phone standards but kind of shameful by any other measure. Something that a pleateau in specs might fix, but I digress.) You might get a year or so of reasonable compatibility beyond that but we're already seeing apps that start at iOS 8.
If you're spending £600 on the latest iPhone at 64GB, that's £150 per supported year
If you're spending £500 on last year's 5S at 32GB, that's £166 per supported year
If you're spending £400 on a 5C at 32GB, if you can still find one, that's £200 per supported year.
Viewed as "renting the device" for a certain number of years of faithful service, you really are better off going with the newest model. I'm not sure about the Android or Windows Phone situation though.
(As you can guess I've been doing this calculation to figure out which phone I should buy. I would probably be on an iPhone 5C already if I wasn't worried about it running out of support before I pay it off.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
All I care about are:
1. Battery Life
2. Phone Size (one hand usability)
3. Internet speed
4. Battery Life
5. Battery Life
6. Battery Life
This kind of information is usually impossible to evince from specs (which, as a consumer I sadly have to extrapolate from the wildly inaccurate and misleading marketing material)
Do smartphone specs even matter for the average smartphone user anymore?
Generally speaking no they do not. I would argue that they never really did aside from plainly obvious things like screen size or ability to access data. Certain features are basically table stakes (good screen, camera, adequate storage, etc) but it's pointless to pay for features I'm not going to need or use. Sure I'm happy if the phone is faster but I don't really give a crap how many Mhz the processor has or how much RAM it has unless it somehow gets in my way. I want enough performance that I can do the activities I want without the perception that the phone is holding me back. Whether the Samsung or the Apple device has marginally higher screen resolution is not something I care about at all unless the difference is very noticeable.
Personally though I wish the phone makers (Apple I'm looking at you) would get over this obsession with making the phone as thin as possible and put a bigger battery in the damn things. There is a reason companies like Mophie are making a lot of money selling battery cases. Lots of us value longer battery life over thinness and weight.
Like desktops, the vast majority of people will never truly tax their CPU, and haven't for a long time.
Memory almost always becomes a bottleneck, and I'm of the opinion there's seldom such thing as too much of that, and almost never enough.
So, my older Android phone, or my Nexus 7 tablet ... a newer generation has more CPU power, and more memory, and would probably be an improvement. Between two of the latest and greatest phones ... probably not so much.
But, in terms of device longevity, in a few years when the OS has been updated numerous times, and your old device is old and busted, you will see it fall behind.
Which is kind of annoying, because my Motorola Krazr was an awesome phone which I had for almost 10 years. And I can't say I'm overly keen to get on the upgrade treadmill because new OS versions are out or the vendor has added some bauble to the phone.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Android handsets are in a numbers race as far as specs go, going so far as to push beyond what anyone would appreciably notice. Case in point: The LG G3 with its 1440p, making for 534 PPI. What, exactly, is the point of this ridiculous PPI? You certainly aren't going to notice a difference between a 1080p screen and that one at these screen sizes unless you're used to using your phone under a magnifying glass or an inch away from your face. And yet it's a big feature, proudly displayed as the first bullet point on the website. It's a numbers game.
Then there's the dual core vs quad core (and beyond) and maximum clock speed bit, which is absurd when you consider that different implementations (Qualcomm vs Apple for instance) even within the same architecture will have different levels of efficiency. In the PC world, for instance, Intel's processors absolutely dominate AMD's per-core and per-clock, and both are x86-64. For some perspective on that, Anandtech wrote that a single Haswell core has double the floating point performance of two AMD modules - four "cores". For Android's part, the trend seems to be, similarly to AMD, pushing for higher and higher clocks (Snapdragon 80x), and not efficiency. This can be seen in the preliminary benchmark results that show Apple's supposedly underpowered CPU topping the charts.
And then, coming back to the story's example of the Nexus 5 vs the iPhone 6, comparing Android to iOS as far as RAM requirements go couldn't possibly be more misguided. iOS is far more restrictive as to what an app can do in the background than Android is, and much more aggressive with reclaiming memory for the app in the foreground. Android keeps apps running for as long as possible (until memory is needed, basically), and apps can do essentially whatever they want to do in the background. This also factors in to battery life, where power consumption on Android is likely to be much higher and therefore much larger batteries are being used there for what is basically similar battery life.
It's for those reasons that it's tough to actually compare the two ecosystems, and it's tough to say whether the specs really make that much of a difference to the overall experience. I think the ultimate answer is that regardless of performance numbers on paper, we've hit the wall for what we're expecting our devices to do. For my part, I say that, for now at least, specs are irrelevant. As long as the device is able to handle the tasks thrown at it without choking and has the features I'm looking for, it's a device worth considering. I think the Nexus series in particular has always embodied that point of view.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
I am still using an old `Droid 4, and unless I decide to start up Facebook on the damned thing, it runs along smoothly. I use my phone as a tool to look up information and equipment specs while I am working, pay my bills, balance my checkbook, read emails.... It is a compass, flashlight, crude tape measure and a bar-code scanner. I use the GPS, star map, and it of course, text and phone. Everything runs fine and smooth except Facebook. I think that some app writers (like the aforementioned Facebook) don't hesitate to chew up all available resources, but the specs on the phone itself matter little to the average user.
That'll be the next killer "feature" (which is ironic, as phones from 10-15 years ago always had a battery life of 3+ days).
They had great battery life because you couldn't actually do much with them.
That said I REALLY wish the phone manufacturers would get off this thinner=better treadmill and make a phone with a thicker battery that will actually last at least a day. The fact that companies like Mophie have a successful business selling cases with built in batteries is all you need to know to understand that lots of customers actually value battery life over thin and light.
If one is using a phone for viewing 3-d brain scans, I might worry that something could be missed that might be important for my future on the planet. A bigger screen with much better resolution and a nice dark undistracted room might be better for viewing brain scans.
I use my phone more often than any other possession I own.
This means any extra money I spend on top of what I "need" is well worth it.
FWIW, I purchased a 5s a few days ago. Not a 6.
If used for internet browsing my Iphone 4s is, I estimate, four times slower than I need it to be.
1080p Screen
Expandable Memory Card Slot
Removable Battery
(preferably front facing stereo speakers)
^ Please show me the phone with those four simple specs???
And since Google screwed up Android by not allowing apps to save to the external memory, a 128gb internal memory.
Are you comparing the list price to the contract price? Because there are very few $200 smartphones that are capable of doing much but the basics and performance will be sloppy. If you want a 1 year phone and don't mind less than optimal performance then yeah. But as we've seen, many will pay for a good user experience over the long term. Of course plans like AT&T's Next are blurring this as more people will be upgrading sooner than they would have.
This reminds me of the super long debate about price and value. I personally own a Moto G and don't really notice the difference with the latest galaxy phones when doing the every day tasks mentioned in the article. You should try to buy what you need and spend the rest of the money on clothing or something. That's gonna give you a lot more status, if that's what you're looking for... Gamers are a completely different thing, though!
#1 Does the volume go high enough? (actually, I often want several steps between 4 and 5)
#2 Does it fit in my pocket? (a big complaint of my wife -- most modern phones are too big for anything but a purse)
#3 Can I enjoy watching a movie on a screen that size (I want a 70" smartphone)
#4 Can I watch movies for the whole flight without plugging it in?
#5 How fast does my app appear (which has very little to do with specs, more to do with software)
#6 Can the GPS synch before I miss my exit?
That's enough specs for anyone
Design for Use, not Construction!
an iPhone 6 owner.
Some geeks look at measurements, condensed to numbers, and call it "specs". Geeks like numbers.
Many things that matter don't work that way. An awful example is cameras and megapixels - megapixels are a simple spec that is easy to compare and absolutely meaningless. The iPhone 6+ has a lot of improvements that make the camera work an awful lot better and let you make a lot better pictures (if it all works as advertised, which I didn't have a chance to test), and that all cannot be measured in specs.
There are other meaningless numbers. USB3 flash drives and transfer speed: Do a proper benchmark and you find out that most of these drive have performance that totally breaks down if you copy small files which make them totally useless for some purposes. No matter what the "transfer speed" says.
If you buy hard drives, you'll have a hard time finding anything below 500 GB. For must users that's much more than they will ever need (not everyone obviously), so 500GB, 1TB, 2TB is all the same.
I think sometimes people fail to recognize that the specs never really mattered. Not for any of it.
Does it matter what resolution the screen is? No. It matters whether the screen appears to be sharp. Does it matter how much RAM you have, or how fast the clock speed is on your processor? No, it matters whether applications are responsive. What really matters to people is the qualitative experience of using the object.
Specs and benchmarks are ways that you might try to quantify that experience. For the sharpness of the display, you can give the screen resolution and that can serve as an indication of the sharpness. For the speed of the device, you could measure how long it takes to complete a specific task, and that benchmark serves as an indicator of the speed. Those indicators may be more or less helpful. Some of these indicators (clock speed of the processor, megapixels of the camera) are often not that helpful anymore. But either way, they're just pieces of information that are helpful for shopping, for turning the qualitative aspects into quantities that make it easier to perform a direct comparison between products, and that's the only reason they're meaningful.
But a lot of the time, people lose sight of that. Especially when they have an agenda, and want to say, "my gadget is fancier than your gadget because it has more sneezelflopits." It doesn't matter what a sneezelflopit is, or whether it serves any purpose.
On the other hand, processors have been getting more powerful. They just haven't been doing that by increasing clock speed.
The is my biggest problem with the phone market. Especially in regards to Android. The time for supported updates is just such a short time. The phone I currently have is running Android 2.3 because there was never an update past that point. Android 4 was released 6 months after my phone was released, and it never saw a software update to version 4. It's another one of the reasons I won't spend $600 on a phone. There is no guarantee that says I will ever get software updates. Basically the choice are go with Apple and pay a whole lot of money to be reasonable assured updates will be available but be stuck without an option for an SD card, and be out a lot of money if there's some hardware failure after 2 years. Or buy a $200 Android phone every 2 years, spend way less money overall, and not having to worry about some hardware malfunction costing me so much money to replace the entire phone.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Given how bloated web sites are, and the move away from mobile to full desktop web sites, yes, our phones need all the horsepower they can get.
Yup. In many cases, the newer SoCs in phones have improved performance-per-watt.
Not always though... If you want amazing performance-per-watt, you don't want a flagship SoC, you want a midrange one. The quad Cortex-A7 Snapdragon 400 blows away any member of the 600 or 800 family in terms of battery performance. This is, among other reasons, why most of the Android Wear OEMs have chosen Snapdragon 400 units and disabled the unnedded cores. (Motorola was the only exception, and their usage of an OMAP3 has led to major criticisms of battery life since it's made on an ancient manufacturing process and the Cortex-A8 is significantly less power-efficient than the A7 even on the same manufacturing process.)
I have a device with a 2.5 GHz Snapdragon 801. Most of the time I've capped the CPU frequency at 1.5-1.7 GHz and don't notice a difference.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Because there are very few $200 smartphones that are capable of doing much but the basics and performance will be sloppy
Huh? You must have missed the Moto G, $150 and it's almost the same as the Nexus 5 from TFA. If you insist on 4G then the Moto G LTE comes closer to $200. There are now a bunch of competitors to the Moto G, though only a few are available in the US.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I've never met an Apple lover who gave a damn about stats beyond "it's more biggerer."
It's about having the newest iToy to make the plebians that only own the last generation iToy to make sure they know their place in the pecking order at Starbucks.
Specs != performance.
From what I see around me, perfomance is not an issue for any less than 3yo phone. Specifications are still key though: screen size, battery life, camera, sound quality on speakers and headset. One issue is that specs are sometimes off the mark: good screen doesn't mean more pixels, it means legible in bright light, at an angle, with good colors... Good camera doesn't man moar pixels, it means good pictures inside with no blur, etc etc.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Phones are still an order of magnitude too slow (at least) for their UI. My latest phone is the quickest yet but still nowhere near as responsive as it should be. We aren't even close yet. I would add that it may be business model, as UI lag is the #1 cause of high-speed smartphone-concrete interaction, thus leading to new phone purchases.
This sig washed every five years whether it needs it or not!
...as they used to be. I just want a smaller screen than 4.3 inches! If I have to live with lesser specs, too bad but FINE, I WILL.... JUST GIVE ME SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T SUCK TO CARRY AROUND. 3.5" - 4" for a phone screen is plenty. I already have a tablet.
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77 77 77 2e 6d 65 6c 76 69 6e 73 2e 63 6f 6d
LOL. Your delusion at how the medical community actually does things is pretty funny.
I would happily trade in about 75% of my existing phone's processing power (and all of its 3D graphics capability) in exchange for a couple hundred bucks.
This is the reason I just went to a Moto G LTE. Damn good phone. Yeah, I wait for the home screen to redraw. But let's face it, I'm not doing real work on my phone. I mostly use it to fill my leisure time. I can wait the extra 250 ms. I can read my emails, call, surf the web, control my chromecast, get tokens just like I can on a $550 S5. Totally agree with this article.
Yeah,, at least on Android there's enough of a problem that they work to mitigate its impact. iOS developers are quite happy to accept the two-year upgrade cycle as the norm. It's kind of like the "digital cliff": on Android these days you get a gradual decline in support, first carrier updates, then Google app updates, then software compatibility. On iOS, Apple stops updating and that's basically it as far as new features go, as well as iWork, iLife, and many of the best apps.
I'd be much more comfortable with an Android handset that only had two years of support left, than an Apple one. And right now it's looking like it might be all I can afford.
The most important spec that needs improvement on pretty much all smart phones is that of battery length. All brands lie like thieves about how long they last. For being "portable" devices, anyone that really uses those 5" screens are going to be tethered to an outlet every few hours.
For my money, I would rather see development in efficiency of the display, and processor, and advances in battery capacity over any new feature being developed. I would rather see apps that have to be clever to use what resources are available that the usual cheap garbage bloat that comes with probably most of these poorly and cheaply designed applications. Give me a smart phone that I can actually USE all day, and that will be the one I buy. Currently I like most others are part of that roving zombie hoard looking for outlets all over the place, then shambling over to them in a rush to plug our dying devices in to try and eek out a couple more minutes of battery time.
Spec DO matter if you want to emulate other hardware =/
Specs never have mattered to the common user... but as long as a newer device seems 'bigger', or is purported to support newer technologies replete with acronyms, or can support newer apps, it will seem superior.
1440p @ 534DPI
hush you, if they keep at it we will maybe again see reasonable resolutions (more than 1080 lines) on average laptop screens.
Voice recognition is the most processor intensive thing most users commonly do, and today everybody does it remotely on big servers, primarily because you need a bunch of data in RAM to do it fast.
We probably won't see this on phones until we get really low-power RAM (memristor-based, maybe).
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
CPUs have been fast enough for the mainstream users for 30 years now. It's by definition: nothing becomes mainstream if it's not "good enough".
Screencasting/bluetooth as a desktop replacement is still far too slow. LZMA takes seconds per megabyte. IDEs run like molasses. Video editing is awful. Offline voice recognition sucks. Heavy web apps are laggy. Stitching a photosphere takes minutes.
Let's not stop now.
People spend too much anyway.
I paid 80$ for a huawei y-530.
Dual core 1.2 ghz, 512mb of ram.
It does netflix, youtube, music, email, and all that other fun stuff, even some games with decent 3d graphics.
I really don't need more out of my phone.
So I had one post that was a response to the question "Do specs matter", but I just RTFA, and I want to respond to that too. The complaint seems to be that, in tests of application load time, a brand new high-end phone isn't significantly faster than a high-end phone that's 1 year old. The conclusion is that, therefore, people buying new phones are doing so for stupid reasons, which is extremely foolish because they cost $900.
And yes, I'm sure some people buying them are doing so for dumb reasons. But the implied assumption there is that new high-end phones are being purchased every year by people whose main concern is application load speed. The truth is, a lot of people buying phones have phones that are at least 2 years old, and in America at least, a lot of them are buying it as part of deal that gets them the phone for something closer to $200. So not only the the cost much lower, the the benefit is much greater because an iPhone 6 actually is significantly faster than an iPhone4, for example.
But beyond that, there are features that are new. Maybe someone wants the bigger screen. It seems like much ado about nothing.
Most people who use smartphones on a daily basis use them for pretty basic things such as checking email, casual web browsing, navigation and reminders. Those who use their phones to their maximum capacity for things like gaming are a staunch minority.
I love all these citations everywhere when people try to defend the crappy specs with this excuse.
Face it, Apple cheaped out on your new useless shiny brick. Stick with the old one and wait it out, or switch brand.
But the features! http://nedroid.com/2014/08/pho...
I'm not sure about the Android or Windows Phone situation though.
The Nexus 5 32GB is £249. Officially, Google only guarantees to continue supporting and upgrading devices for 18 months, which would give an at-release "rental" price of £166. However, Google seems to have quietly abandoned the 18-month limit, given that the Nexus 4 is supposed to be receiving Android L, which means it will be supported through the end of 2015 at which point it will be three years old. If we assume the year-old Nexus 5 will follow the same course there's two years of support left, making the Nexus 5 "rental", £125 per year if you buy it right now, or £83 if you bought it when it came out.
Of course, since Nexus devices are unlocked it's pretty easy for users to continue upgrading them even after Google stops releasing updates. So assuming you're willing to type a few commands from time to time, the per-year price can be very low. My son is still using my Galaxy Nexus and there's no reason it won't continue being a very usable phone for another 2-3 years, always on the latest OS (I flashed a development version of L to a Galaxy Nexus a couple of weeks ago and it ran quite well). If we can assume that the Nexus 5 is good for five years, the at-release annual "rental" price is £50.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Oops, I forgot that the Nexus 5 used to be £300. So adjust all of the at-release numbers upward accordingly.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
An awful lot of those phones are going directly to resale. http://recode.net/2014/09/20/a...
So, the next big thing is a full blown iPhone 6 in the form of an Apple Watch, or the Android equivalent if you can't think in terms of Apple. We've got a lot of squeezing down to do to get there. But the equation needs to be reversed..instead of requiring an iPhone to own an Apple Watch, the equation should be you must have an Apple Watch to own an iPhone, because that's where the brains are. The Phone becomes just a big pretty screen for displaying what your watch does.
Then the next step is your Google Glass form factor or a behind the ear hearing aid form factor that communicates to you through bone conductivity. The phone is just a dumb terminal at some point.
That's why specs matter. Not because of now, but because in 5 years, these are the stepping stones we have to take to get where we're going.
Because Android is written in java,...GC...then works!
Counterpoint: I bought a Motorola Defy in January 2011. It came with Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). Motorola never went beyond Gingerbread on this device. Fortunately, some people - me amongst them but that is beside the point - ported newer versions of Android to this phone. It currently runs the latest available version (Android 4.4.4), it remains to be seen whether it'll be possible to get 'Android L' up and running. I bought the device for about $200 (in Europe, it'd have been cheaper in the US).
While it would have been nice if Motorola had put a bit more energy in producing updates, less in trying to thwart others doing the same, this end up being a non-issue because of the open source nature of Android.
No, you don't need Google to run Android. It runs fine without Google apps. You don't need the play store, there are many alternatives. You don't need Google Mail, Google Maps, Google location services, Google Backup, Google anything. The phone runs fine with one of the many alternatives.
The result? Four of these phones here in the house, all running a late version of Android - between 4.3 and 4.4.4 - and all working fine with whatever software the user wants. One of them runs Google Apps, the others do without.
Is Android the final answer to all your mobile questions? Certainly not, it can be improved in many ways. The good thing is that it is possible to change what you don't like, keep what you like without being tied down by manufacturers plans of forced obsolescence. As long as the hardware is capable of running the most recent release, an enterprising individual or group thereof should be able to get it to run. This only needs to be done *once*, as the results can be distributed without licensing problems. This means that any reasonably popular device will eventually get an update, whether the manufacturer likes it or not.
--frank[at]unternet.org
That money is "well worth it" only if it generates some marginal improvement. That marginal improvement is deeply in dispute.
Mindlessly throwing money at a problem is of ZERO value.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You assume that you must have the cool new app of the week. A phone from five years ago still works exactly the same as it did when updates for it stopped last year. Very few people _need_ iOS 8. A 2009 model iPhone 3GS running iOS 6 (2014) does everything most people need.
You can easily get a 3GS for $26 and use it for another two years - $13 per year.
That's the whole point of Apple's walled garden and their policy on multi-tasking. Obviously Android has gone a different route and I can't fault them for doing so--but it isn't an unsolvable problem by any stretch of the imagination.
let me just say that I have a single core Samsung Galaxy for Boost Mobile USA that is two years old. The phone works on Sprint's network. Sprint isn't all that bad. The smartphone does everything that I need. It has a 3.5 inch screen. I can put it in my pocket. It has a GPS receiver and 2.4 GHZ and 5 GHz wifi capability. I usually use Facebook and the weather apps on the phone. I haven't tried the camera yet.
When I go to Australia I will buy their cheap 3G smartphone for $80. I don't want to spend $200 on a 4G smartphone if I am only going to stay in Australia for two weeks. Hey, I might even buy a $30 basic phone.
anyways, that is my 2 cents
What matters to me these days is display size and resolution. Ideally, around 4.5-4.7" with at least 720p resolution. Most phones are getting too big, and the display resolutions are getting ridiculous.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
very few $200 smartphones that are capable of doing much but the basics and performance will be sloppy.
Microsoft was never this bad when it came to performance!
It all comes down to software. Nobody knows what future software might do. Imagine, for example, some pretty decent AI running locally on the phone, accurate (and fluent) voice and face recognition and powerful augmented reality or virtual reality applications and you really start pushing the envelope.
Then again, you could already do all that on a desktop but nobody seems to care enough to develop that kind of stuff. So, here I am in front of a multi-gazzilion-FLOP desktop running the same Office application I used ten years ago and listening to MP3s (which I first encoded on a Pentium in the previous century).
Which is why we may, or may not, see the need for better phone specifications, depending on the evolution of their software ecosystems.
Yeah, sometimes you get lucky and you happen to get a phone which is supported by Cyanogenmod and other non-Google Android distributions. Whether or not the device will be supported by the hacker community is largely up to chance. Mostly it's a combination of the popularity of the phone, as well as whether or not they can find drivers that support the hardware for the newer version of the OS. With the closed source nature of the handsets themselves there's very little the hacker community can do to get a newer version of Android working on a phone that simply doesn't have drivers available.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I wrote this. I think it's hilarious that I got 5: Interesting as a logged-in user expressing these, and Score 0: Troll for elaborating on them further.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Every time a question is posted in a title, instead of a normal comment, I'm just going to link this from now on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Specs never mattered for anything. What matters is features. Can the phone do X without delay? If the answer is yes, who cares if they made it happen with 1 or 2 Ghz? Unfortunately, it takes a functional R&D department to come up with the next killer app. R&D suffering under the weight of idiotic management practices (as is the norm in the technology industry) won't be able to recognize its own good ideas or turn them into profits, so the best they can do is give Android some faster hardware to play with.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Whoops, you're right! But since 4k is becoming a buzzword, larger screens are on the way to getting more pixel density even so.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
There's also people like me that can't seem to keep a phone working for more than a year or two .
At this point , I think I'll be sticking to phones like the Moto e or g , $200 for a workable phone , not customization to make it annoying (every non nexus android I've used had weird little issues with sharing objects between the built in apps and newer apps from the store)
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
It's all a balancing act, and if the final goal isn't UX, then everything is going to come crashing down.
As fields mature, the dimension along which they compete changes. Once the major products are all adequate, they compete on things other than technical specs. Technical specs beyond a certain threshold for phones become largely irrelevant to consumers.
Competition is now occurring in other spaces: Branding, Network Advantages, even some on security post-Snowden.
Eventually the products will compete on price almost entirely, but we won't be there for a long time.
It takes 10s of milliseconds to read and decompress one full screen jpeg. You can not even imagine what kind of rich apps would be possible if this could happen in a blink of an eye. Of course if it kills battery in an hour, you wouldn't want to imagine, so the improvement has to be specs per watt.
It's amazing the psychological infection that gets people to stand in line for a hours, if not days, for something that won't really do anything more for them than the one they already have.
This already happened with desktop computers. A few years ago, we reached the point where basic desktop machines had a few 3GHz CPUS, a few gigabytes of memory, a terabyte or so of disk, and the capability to talk to a 100MHz Ethernet. There, things stopped. Desktop machines haven't become significantly more powerful since. They still power much of the business world, they work fine, and nobody is "upgrading". Innovation in desktops has become cosmetic - Apple makes one that comes in a round can.
Phones seem to be getting there. The iPhone 6 has no major technical improvements over the iPhone 5. Its specs are comparable to the Nexus 4 of two years ago. We may be approaching that point with phones.
You get the ability to leave your carrier whenever you want, or in the case of some Android phones that aren't sold by carriers (Nexus devices and Moto X) you get an unlockable bootloader, but about 90% of the smartphone buying population don't care about that or even know what it means.
To the 10 or 15% who are early adopters maybe. To everyone else, no. Doesn't matter never mattered never will. And for what it's worth most carriers tweak their images so much they eat up all performance variables with their shit code and bloatware. Moreover, if you're a Sprint customer, you don't have a network unless you're on WiFi, so performance is meaningless bullshit anyway.
I keep coming back to this great bit of analysis from Anand when he was reviewing the iPhone 5s:
"In such a thermally constrained environment, going quad-core only makes sense if you can properly power gate/turbo up when some cores are idle. I have yet to see any mobile SoC vendor (with the exception of Intel with Bay Trail) do this properly, so until we hit that point the optimal target is likely two cores. You only need to look back at the evolution of the PC to come to the same conclusion. Before the arrival of Nehalem and Lynnfield, you always had to make a tradeoff between fewer faster cores and more of them. Gaming systems (and most users) tended to opt for the former, while those doing heavy multitasking went with the latter. Once we got architectures with good turbo, the 2 vs 4 discussion became one of cost and nothing more. I expect weÃ(TM)ll follow the same path in mobile.
Then thereÃ(TM)s the frequency discussion. Brian and I have long been hinting at the sort of ridiculous frequency/voltage combinations mobile SoC vendors have been shipping at for nothing more than marketing purposes. I remember ARM telling me the ideal target for a Cortex A15 core in a smartphone was 1.2GHz. SamsungÃ(TM)s Exynos 5410 stuck four Cortex A15s in a phone with a max clock of 1.6GHz. The 5420 increases that to 1.7GHz. The problem with frequency scaling alone is that it typically comes at the price of higher voltage. ThereÃ(TM)s a quadratic relationship between voltage and power consumption, so itÃ(TM)s quite possibly one of the worst ways to get more performance. Brian even tweeted an image showing the frequency/voltage curve for a high-end mobile SoC. Note the huge increase in voltage required to deliver what amounts to another 100MHz in frequency."
In light of this sort of thinking, Apple's decisions continue to make a lot of sense. They can use less power, generate less heat, and still come out on top of most real-world tests and benchmarks. Anandtech's preliminary review of the iPhone 6es shows the A8 being far ahead on most relevant benchmarks, but falling behind on the physics simulation. Realistically, most people programming for mobile don't actually have problems that parallelize very well. My email client or podcasting app might need two threads or processes going on at once (one for foreground processing and another for background downloads, perhaps?) but it's unlikely that it'll need more. Physics simulations parallelize nicely by comparison, and the Android phones with more cores clearly stomp the 2-core A8. But how often do I run that sort of simulation on my phone? Nearly never, even with today's games.
1) Is the screen small enough to fit in my pocket?
2) Will the battery last long enough for me to use it actively, more or less all day long, for 24-36 hours on a charge?
3) Does it have a physical, qwerty keyboard?
The answers are:
No.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
This is where I have hopes for Firefox OS, but still the very early phones are left out (first ZTE Open). The Open C might fare better, but you'll have to count on yourself to flash the thing (jumping through the requisite handful of hoops) to get updates early or to install later versions of the OS, presumably.
Anyway, the system is simple since it's only linux, the firefox browser and some glue. So no fear of running out of space for the base install and the system can only get faster or stay as fast with time (well browsers only get faster, it's the web content out there that sucks)
Probably a good idea to wait for Firefox OS 2.x versions..
As for the security updates problem on Android, I deal with it by not owning a smartphone at all and recommend not using a smartphone, except perhaps as an offline media player. Or at least there should be a website somewhere where which can track which phones are supported, when they get updates, which are EOL and which are EOL but with no word from the manufacturer.
Specs aren't doubling everywhere anymore. We've been for three years on the 28 nanometer process and the software, hardware features have matured. So now the low end stuff is enough.
every year, I meant
Are you trying to run VNC or similar over bluetooth? That doesn't seem like a great idea.
For fast low-latency remote desktops, you now have vid cards encoding the whole thing to H264 or H265 (only gtx 970/980 does the latter for now), but you'll probably want fast wifi or wired networking to use it.
For the rest of your problems, too bad for you. I don't mind it much. Glad to know the Ray Kurzweil types were entirely wrong and that I don't have to fear the rise of Skynet for now.
Specs that matter:
Attenuation
Signal-to-Noise (radio)
Signal-to-Noise (voice/sound)
Battery life (talk time/standby time/&c.)
Yield strength (can I run over it with my car?)
IP Code
Toddler-proof
I think the real question should be, did specs ever matter to the average smartphone user?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
But for me, the most important spec for a new phone would be an integrated slide-out keyboard and any sort of modern OS/RAM. It's just a shame so many people have bought in the Swype hype, it's never as fast or efficient as a keyboard, and there are tons of people (maybe not the majority) who miss them. The last good phone I found was the Droid 4, which I still use, but it's pretty long in the tooth specs-wise.
If there are any /.'ers that can recommend something newer with a *real* keyboard I would be very much in your debt. I tried a bluetooth keyboard on an S4, but then autocorrect no longer worked, not to mention being about 3x heaver than an integrated keyboard. Sometimes new technology isn't always superior... I'm fairly certain that the reason manufacturers hyped touchscreen-only devices is because it's cheaper for them to produce.
What does /. think?
I wish it was enough to have a phone that runs my apps just fine today, and simply stick with those apps. Sadly, my experience has been that I have to upgrade those apps every so often (even if only for security patches), and when I do, most of them are larger and run slower on my now-older phone. After a couple years of upgrades, those same apps now fill all of my phone's storage space, and many run like molasses. My phone is now painfully slow at doing the same things that worked fine when I bought it, even after a factory reset and app re-install. Lesson learned: the next phone I buy is going to need high-end specs if it's going to keep running well for more than a year or so.
Before I bought my current phone (Samsung GS4 Mini), I specifically checked for CyanogenMod etc. support. It's just received the update to 4.4, but it's very likely that no more official updates are coming from Samsung's hand, since they're probably focusing on the S5 generation and beyond.
I really didn't want to add to the semi-monoculture of Samsung-made Android phones, but it was objectively the best choice compared to the competition. It has 1.5GB RAM instead of 1GB, a user-replaceable battery, perfect size, known-good build quality, CyanogenMod compatibility and so on, plus it was on half-off sale with no plan attached at a local electronics chain store. But the CM compatibility was the biggest factor.
Eat the rich.
If you want maximum support, you buy a new-ish phone that has (or is expected to) have solid AOSP rom support.
Yes, you need to do some research to figure this out. Whether doing this is economical or not depends on how you value your time and how much time you expect to need to read up on this.
Right now, to me, a Snapdragon (not Exynos!) based Galaxy S5 looks like a really good choice.
Other people have different opinions. Other people also have different situations. In the US, for example, it's common to have plans that subsidize a large amount of the cost every two years. The plans are priced for that, but you typically don't get cheaper plans by bringing your own phone.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Ah, so you know what the value of various phones are to every person on Earth? If abhi_beckert finds a 5S more comfortable to use than an Android, and uses it constantly for a couple of years, that's likely worth a few hundred dollars.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Most people only see the $200 contract price. They might back if they paid outright (as my sister has).
It's not really Apple's fault. They're just taking advantage of the current market. The big carriers prefer top his the true cost of phone. Take Verizon: the Samsung Gusto 3 (a very basic flip phone) retails for $150 off contract. That's usually $50 or less on a GSM network. (Though AT&T only allows unlocked devices because the FCC forced them to.)
The carriers now want to end phone subsidies most likely due to Apple. Apple gets all the money on the phone sales. No $150 flip phone nonsense here.
The only specs the average consumer cares about is screen size, battery life, reception quality and maybe capacity. And even then many, perhaps most people don't even come close to using all of the internal capacity of their phones.
Anything beyond that is just stuff for people with some tech savvy to argue and evangelize about. Most people just don't care about snapdragon vs A8 or whatever.
An average user has two things in their pockets: a phone, and a wallet. There's been a lot of effort to put the wallet into the phone, but metro cards, door keys, cash, business cards, and so many other things just fit better in a wallet. The specs that really matter to non-power users are physical size and battery life. As a power user, I can't wait until 512GB capacity and Disk Mode so I can boot my laptop from my phone, but I think I'm in the minority. Peter
the "average" user buys based on advertising and hype, always have, always will. The informed user ignores the hype and buys what they need, not what has the "best" spec. Still, they study the specs and read "real" reviews (not the marketing hype I find right now in all the American media about the "amazing" new iPhone 6 for example.
Stupid Humans
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
The question isn't whether "mainstream" users buy midrange computers - of course they do, since that's the definition of mainstream.
The question is whether a faster CPU has significant benefit in the things that mainstream people do, so there is a real value to them in a faster and faster CPUs. These days, the CPU is rarely the performance bottleneck - for mainstream applications, more RAM, SSD, faster network, longer battery life, screen resolution, etc., are all of more value to users. So if you're going to spend more to make a "better" device, faster CPU isn't an obvious choice, because the faster CPU means higher cost, shorter battery life, etc., so users might well be much happier with a slower CPU but better battery life, lower cost, etc.
Yes, if a faster CPU didn't cost more, and had no other impact on the device, of course everyone would like a faster CPU. But in the real world, putting a 6 core i7 into a watch would be stupid. :-)
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!