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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.
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.
... get over your fucking phone. It's a convenient electronic bauble, not the center of your fucking existence.
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 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.
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.
Look at it this way - since Apple is the only company selling iPhones, once the display is so good you can't see the pixels there's no rational reason to make the resolution higher as that just increases costs and slows performance with no benefit to the user, and Apple's all about optimizing user experience. In the Android market, there are a bunch of manufacturers all losing money trying to compete in a cut-throat market, so somebody's going to push the screen resolution just so they can put a bigger number on the box and try to get sales that way. And most consumers won't realize that they're buying pixels they can't see, and getting slower performance and shorter battery life, because the manufacturer sure isn't going to put that on the box.
Phones aren't just about specs. Anyone can put a bigger display on a phone - that's easy! The challenge is in making the right tradeoffs between screen, battery, CPU, GPU, camera, etc., to give the best user experience balanced with battery life and size. And Apple is great at making those tradeoffs, because they can apply resources to do "impossible" things, like buying 10,000 CNC mills to mill their phones' "unibody" frames from solid metal in mass production, when any sane phone company would use injection molded plastic because that's cheap and easy. So Apple changed the rules, and makes phones that no other manufacturer can physically make, and they got people to care about it because it lets them make phones that are beautiful and slim. Ditto the innovations in the glass, display, etc. That's not to say that the other companies don't innovate - they do, but they tend to do less interesting, more incremental stuff, like pushing clock speed or screen resolution up a bit, and they leave most of the R&D up to Google and Intel.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
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 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.
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.