Do Specs Matter Anymore For the Average Smartphone User? 253
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?
ObBillGates (Score:5, Insightful)
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
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See: Wirth's Law. [wikipedia.org]
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BTW did you know that the touchtone ( DTMF ) actually allows for 16 keys. 0-9, octothorpe (#), star (*), and A-D.
Re:ObBillGates (Score:5, Informative)
Didn't Bill Gates dismiss this enough saying it is not his phrase, he never said that?
"When we set the upper limit of PC-DOS at 640K, we thought nobody would ever need that much memory." — William Gates, chairman of Microsoft, quoted in the April 29, 1985 issue of InfoWorld.
"I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn’t – it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem." — William Gates, chairman of Microsoft in a recorded speech to the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo about microcomputers.
Looks like Bill's not too proud to revise history...
Re:ObBillGates (Score:5, Insightful)
That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn’t – it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.
Seeing how fast the PC industry develops, if his prediction lasted 6 years, I'd say that's still pretty good.
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Not quite. In 1981 there was already a microprocessor that could address 16M of RAM and used a flat relocatable address space. This microprocessor was used in a CONSUMER microcomputer only 3 short years later.
640k was not "supercomputer" territory by any stretch of the imagination.
That was the domain of mini-computers and that concept had already been shrunk to the size of a single integrated circuit.
There was already plenty of writing on the wall in 1981. You just have to bother to actually look for it (th
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Certainly not the way the PC did it. The standard practice at the time was to do I/O space down from the top, and memory up from the bottom, so that when you got more address space, and Moore's law was well established by then - so you know it would ahppen pretty quick, you added the extra memory in the middle.
Also, most machines too cheap to have proper memory management supported memory banking, where the same address space addressed different memory based on a a "b
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In my first job in the mid-70s, whether to buy another megabyte of memory for the mainframes was a VP-level decision. This was a pretty large business, but clearly megabytes were no longer for supercomputers only.
Once we had semiconductor memory instead of core memory, it got a whole lot cheaper. A few years before 1981, I put 32K in 4116s into my TRS-80 on the grounds that it was only about $10/K. I then watched the price continue to plunge and the capacity grow. In 1981, I don't think predicting pu
Re:ObBillGates (Score:5, Informative)
While I'm not a Gates fan, this whole thing looks like stupid urban rumor.
Looks like Bill's not too proud to revise history...
It seems to me that Bill isn't revising history here. He made the 64k to 640k comment in 1981, but never said anything about not needing more than that. Then infoworld pops this quote with no reference or anything. They certainly didn't interview him so where on earth did they pull that quote from? A lot of people have looked into it, including people from that page you sourced this from, yet nobody could find a proper source.
Which by the way, the page AC is referencing is here: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2... [quoteinvestigator.com]
Re:ObBillGates (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, I think what he said was, "One mouse button ought to be enough for anybody," ... oh wait.
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Specs? (Score:3, Funny)
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Same here. I've derided the thought of a "phablet" like some friends have, I wonder how they hell they put those comfortably in their front pockets and still sit without crushing them.
But, more and more, I find I have to carry 'readers' around with me to do much on the phone other than talk on it.
I don't use my phone for much more than text or voice, but with the new iPhone 6, I'm gonna give a look at screen size increase and see what fits
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IP68 the only thing I'm waiting for in a phone (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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IP68 would be good, though the SGS5 IP67 is decent... why aren't (almost) all phones doing that?
With the size of the phones, I'd like to see MSATA support on some select models, but I also think Ubuntu's dream of a phone that is also your desktop is something viable (feels inevitable to me, but I won't be surprised if it never happens because of some other advancement).
Depends on the specs. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Ding.
We have a winner.
CPUs and GPUs do matter for things like battery usage and screen quality though(well, GPUs do; if you have a 1440p screen your GPU better be able to cope with it). Also memory still matters in some ways. I'm kind of disappointed that the iPhone 6 is still 1gb of RAM, but I suspect that has more to do with issues of power consumption than it does Apple being cheap.
It's all a balancing act, and if the final goal isn't UX, then everything is going to come crashing down.
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Yeah. Windows, as far as I can tell, shows iowait CPU as normal CPU usage.
Linux, at least, shows iowait usage in a separate bin, letting you know when you're I/O bound.
Nearly every time I've found my system unresponsive/slow, I've noticed my CPU utilization bar on my system monitor widget is almost entirely green. Green = iowait.
In a number of cases, the iowait was high because my system was swap thrashing. If your system bogs down under heavy multitasking, it's much more likely you need more RAM and not
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Windows 8 task manager shows disk utilisation. If it is 100% you are i/o bound.
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At the high end, processor, RAM and GPU specs no longer matter for most people: fast enough is fast enough. Some specs still matter, though, even at the high end: battery life, camera quality, built quality, water resistance (or lack thereof). At the lower and middle end, specs still matter. Too many cheaper phones can't run current versions of important software, grind to a halt if many apps are run together or have screens that are, frankly, poor.
In maybe 3-4 years, even low-end phones will be good enough
Re:Depends on the specs. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think there is a desire for more processing speed to make things like voice recognition faster and more accurate. It's tempting to think that specialist DSPs will accelerate those things, but if history has taught us anything about processors it's that generic always seems to win. Clever tile rendering graphics cards and dedicated physics processors were quickly eclipsed by the raw power of GPUs. Dedicated audio processors made sense once, now a quad core CPU handles it.
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Isn't voice recognition done server-side just now? Having enough power to have Siri running locally, and therefore not dependent upon a good network connection, would be nice.
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The specs matter when what you are doing needs is.
The new iPhone has a bigger screen so that means more pixels to manage. So you need a better GPU.
Now the OS can make a difference as well. iPhone focuses on app experience, android on app performance. Both are good and have their trade offs.
So the iOS device may need more specs to do the same as the android. But that is expected as to get the better experience it needs to do more.
However if what you do is good enough. Don't upgrade.
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This is a popular sentiment, and it is true in the simple sense that if other people are satisfied with 3 GHz CPU:s then you will be satisfied too.
This hides the real reason why clock speeds of new CPU designs are no longer increasing at the rate that that they used to. The reasons are basically that they current way of making chips has largely run its course down to a dead end where it is not feasible to increase the clock speed. Maybe someone will think of a better way to make circuits, but for now we're
Batteries? (Score:2)
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
The specs that matter to me (Score:4, Interesting)
Please... (Score:2, Insightful)
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That's true of everything but minimal food and shelter.
But people use their phones a lot more than any other device, other than perhaps a car or shoes, so it's rational that they want to optimize them.
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Maybe (Score:3)
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.
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Thing is the iPhone 6 is only 326 PPI, while the 6 Plus is 401 PPI. If you couldn't see any improvement beyond the old Retina display level of about 320 PPI then why bother going to 401 PPI for the 6 Plus?
The 6 Plus is basically an admission that the whole Retina display thing was nonsense. If you compare a 320 PPI display to a 400 or 500 PPI one you can see the difference at typical viewing distances. That's all there is to it, everything else was just hype.
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Thing is the iPhone 6 is only 326 PPI, while the 6 Plus is 401 PPI. If you couldn't see any improvement beyond the old Retina display level of about 320 PPI then why bother going to 401 PPI for the 6 Plus?
With that resolution, apps have the choice of mapping 1 point = 2 pixels or 1 point = 3 pixels, so the bigger screen can be used to hold much more information at a slightly smaller point size and original quality, or the same information at much higher point size and higher quality.
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That's true, but note that the spec war arguments tend to focus on megapixels. Which beyond 8MP is totally irrelevant to anyone except a professional photographer, but the frothing over "mine has more MP than yours" is intense.
sPh
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I'd disagree with "irrelevant to anyone except a professional photographer". The real problem is not proffesionals vs amateurs but that the usable megapixels of many small cameras is far lower than the nominal megapixels making the nominal megapixels pretty much meaningless to anyone (including proffesionals).
More usable megapixels are good for pretty much any camera user but the only way to get significantly them is to make the whole camera (sensor and lens) larger and that is a price smartphone users are
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OK, perhaps I should qualify that with "assuming the camera has a decent quality sensor". Although since Apple and Samsung do, that seems a bit redundant for a discussion about spec warriors. If someone is going to claim that their Nogood Phone Ltd QLX8732 with the 897MP sensor that produces images worse than 110 film is competing with the 5S and the S5 then I can't help them.
The fundamental point being that 98% of photos taken today are only ever seen on Facebook or similar, and those services downsampl
Long/Short comment (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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But android is getting more and more dependent on online services (Export import contacts or notes in a file? use of device as usb storage without funky protocols? dev tools non free?) and the other major OSes were not free in the first place. App ecosystems resemble the shareware scene of the 90s with all its good and bad effects.
That means that if marketing decides you can bloat the thing to make people buy newer phones you can do it.
So specs may matter.
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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?
They do but only when comparison to similar OS . As we've seen with the recent Quad core, 2 GB ram, etc specs from Android mfg's that still stutter while another OS brand only has a dual core and the paltry 1GB ram but yet is optimized so it runs very smooth and has a great user experience out of the box.
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Pepperidge Farm Remembers
Comm specs matter (Score:2)
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.
Specs don't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
And it shows in longevity (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Specs matter when ... (Score:2)
... 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.
Spec warriors and the A7 (Score:2)
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 me
Yes, they matter. (Score:2)
Marginal differences don't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
To a certain extent, but not for long ... (Score:3)
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.
This is something I've been noticing for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [anandtech.com] 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 [anandtech.com] 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.
YES!!!! (Score:2)
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.
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#1 Is it loud enough? (Score:2)
#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 fo
Specs matter. Sometimes. (Score:2)
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.
The
Specs never really mattered (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Web sites - yes specs matter (Score:2)
Performance ? probably not. Specs ? YES !! (Score:2)
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.
Specs aren't as important... (Score:2)
Lies! (Score:2)
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 resour
Local voice recognition (Score:2)
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).
I RTFA (Score:2)
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 t
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HSDPA - much less LTE - is already faster than most people's home broadband connections, which is certainly fast enough for most applications. If we're going to see improvements on mobile data it's going to have to happen on the carrier side.
Re:For today, yes; in the future, mostly no. (Score:4, Interesting)
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To quote myself: If we're going to see improvements on mobile data it's going to have to happen on the carrier side.
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Well to be fair, there are backhaul issues, but if the guys on the billing side of the office put some more of the money back into improving infrastructure, that would solve the "technological" side of it.
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Really? In what country? My current ISP gives me 38Mbps down and 10Mbps up and there are far faster options than that here in the UK. My HSPA+ connection on the other hand just about hits 2 down 0.5 up. I'm getting a 4G phone next week but I'm not expecting a vast difference.
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UK. My last place was pretty quick ADSL and it topped out at about 12 down, 2 up. My iPhone 4 on regular old HSDPA was hitting nearly 20 down, 2 up very easily. Might depend on where you live; I imagine the bigger cities have better broadband and worse cellular connections. Regardless, that poor mobile infrastructure is something that's not going to be fixed by improving the phone's radio which is my point.
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UK. My last place was pretty quick ADSL and it topped out at about 12 down, 2 up. My iPhone 4 on regular old HSDPA was hitting nearly 20 down, 2 up very easily. Might depend on where you live; I imagine the bigger cities have better broadband and worse cellular connections. Regardless, that poor mobile infrastructure is something that's not going to be fixed by improving the phone's radio which is my point.
And to relate to the article, these are specs that don't matter if (a) your ADSL connection isn't reliable, or (b) you have a super fast connection for your phone and a 500 MB monthly data allowance that you can go through in four minutes.
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Those aren't issues that will be fixed by improved handset technology though; it's all carrier-side.
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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.
Re:Because... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Because... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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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 lef
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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.
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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.
Re:Because... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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Re:Because... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Re:Because... (Score:5, Funny)
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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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.
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Statements like "Charger is compatible with most cell phone brands requiring 4800- 5000mAh voltage" don't exactly fill me with confidence in the competance of the manufacturer or seller.
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I hope you're right. But battery density really hasn't improved ever - they're the same as they were decades ago. All of the reduction in cell phone battery size has been due to reduced power consumption. A huge factor is improved cell tower penetration. The smaller the cells, the closer the antenna, so transmitting takes less power (half the distance = a quarter the power). And the protocols have been designed to be more power efficient, and the CPU, etc., has gotten smarter, allowing the parts of the phon
Re:It's not just speed (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I found the trick with anything Android is to re-ROM it, preferably get CyanogenMOD (and optionally Gapps) on the device. This deals with most of the issues with bloatware. Even though I use a HTC One M8, my HTC One X+ still is quite usable with CM on it (last CM 11 build was last week.)
There are also development options that can be enabled to limit the tasks in the background, even down to killing anything that isn't in the foreground as well.
I've been using the camera with no issues without the HTC soft
Re:It's not just speed (Score:4, Interesting)
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'.
Long battery life (Score:2)
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.
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Some modern phones also have a similar battery life if you turn off packet data meaning that outside of calls the only radio traffic is occasional interactions with the control channel.
The problem comes when you want to be notified of incoming emails or tweets or whatever so you keep packet data turned on. That means that the phone is constantly bringing up packet data connections so that apps can talk to servers on the internet.
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