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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With the critical caveat that cellular data caps tend to make even the biggest assholes in fixed broadband look like an improvement. Contemporary wireless data standards can, indeed, hit very impressive peak rates; but you'd better not be planning on doing any bulk data transfers, nor should you necessarily be optimistic about ping times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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!
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?
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.
There's also crapware to consider. The Nexus 5 is a good phone because you can mostly, or maybe only, get it from the Google Play store. If you buy a Samsung Galaxy S-whatever, an HTC One, a Motorola Droid, and so forth, chances are good that you're getting it from Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile and they've taken any chance it had of not sucking and blown it to hell by adding so much junk.
I have an HTC One Max. I love the phone. But with a quad core ARM processor and 2GB of RAM, I need a task manager in the background set to insane-frenzy-autokill for the thing to be useful. Otherwise I get twenty services running in the background and everything slows to a crawl. It works wonderfully, but only because of the task manager I installed. Out of the box it's shit. I'm thinking of taking CyanogenMod for a spin, but I'm concerned that the camera driver support won't be as good as HTC's. Even if it does work, 97% of smart phone owners aren't going to install a custom ROM on their phone any more than someone buying a PC from Dell or HP is going to install vanilla Windows (or Arch Linux or something) to avoid all of their prepackaged garbage.
The only other headache I have is that Android applications don't handle switching wifi sources well. If I move between two wireless access points, all of my applications give "network connection lost" errors until I manually kill the application and restart it.
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.
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?
I disagree ... my ability to have a spare battery (which allows me to charge it while using the phone without having an annoying cord attached to the phone) and SD card is more important *to me* than longer battery life and a thinner phone and a better camera. For the most part, those things are irrelevant, my phone battery life is 'good enough' and my phone size is 'thin enough' and my phone camera is 'good enough'. Only smug elitist have to have what they consider to be the best, in my opinion. For 90% of the population, 'good enough' is good enough.
For example, many people only use their phone camera to post to the Internet with no editing ,, so anything about about 4MB really doesn't gain anyone anything. People who want a quality camera buy a camera .. people who want to take pictures of their food use their phone. Granted, I wouldn't knowingly buy a phone with a really crappy camera, but even my Samsung Gear 2 watch takes pictures suitable for posting on Facebook. Now, I've taken some great pictures with my Samsung 4, just got back from a motorcycle trip to San Francisco and took some amazing coastal panoramas with it.
Specs are important, but not everyone cares about the same specs. Some people don't care as much about battery life or camera quality. I am interested int he Samsung Active because it's water resistant.. It's nice to have a wide variety of phones.
Which is why I buy Android phones, they offer the most choices of any type of smartphone. More vendors, more options, more price ranges. I can move from one vendor to another and not loose the apps I've bought.
There is nothing in the Apple specs that provides that capability. And why I'll never buy an iPhone. No matter how amazing their camera is.
I have a dSLR and specialty lenses for amazing. And no .. it's not the 'best' camera out there either. Just one that is 'good enough'.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
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.