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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.
Because people have needed dick extensions and fake breasts and other fashion items for much longer than there was a smartphone.
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
Because maintaining the status quo without innovating has worked out well for the consumers (eg. TI calculators)? Because what we need now is what we need in the future is for ISP's only?
You get better battery life AND increased specs to the crappy Nexus. 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.
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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.
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.
Apple has released over EIGHT iOS systems in even fewer years. Android in that period? One with four .point releases. v3 does not count for anything. Window Phone? Two, each woth a .point release. About sums it up, don't it. The others can pray for a miracle. Maybe join up with the Islamic state and JIHAD. The others are in desperate times, my friends. Desperate times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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...
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!
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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.