Hardware Specs Myth

Most people shop for a smartphone the same way they’d shop for a PC. A person will typically try to pick the phone that looks the best quantitatively.  They’ll want the phone with the highest processor speed, the largest RAM or the largest number of pixels packed in the camera. The problem with this is that the touted quantitative figure doesn’t always guarantee the expected qualitative experience.  I’m going to highlight the two most misleading criteria we use when judging different smartphones.
Megapixels
The widely held assumption is that the higher the number of megapixels, the better the picture quality.  However, other factors like the size of the image sensor and the glass covering it also affect the clarity of pictures.  For instance, a 3MP phone might take better shots than its 6MP counterpart. Strange, isn’t it?  A technical explanation is that phones come with image sensors roughly the same size. Consequently, a 6MP camera packs more pixels than the 3MP in the same comparable space. This leads to noise (because the pixels are closer together) that produces images of a lower clarity. So basically, don’t fret over the number of pixels touted by the manufacturer. Cameras don’t take pictures, photographers do.

Processor speed & RAM Size
A friend of mine recently picked a HTC Flyer over an iPhone 4. In his words, “A Flyer has more RAM and a faster processor than the iPhone.  I want a fast phone.” The problem with his reasoning was that it wasn’t objective in truth and compared specific hardware specs between phones from different ecosystems. iPhones don’t need that much processor power and memory compared to their Android counterparts.  Why? Because iOS is so well baked onto the hardware; it needs less computing power to accomplish tasks.  Apple’s vertical integration ensures that despite having lower processors you’d never notice the iPhone 4 being slower than the Flyer in use. In fact, you’d argue that Android phones are wasteful because they consume more CPU and Ram to achieve the same tasks as an iPhone. iOS applications are made in an iOS SDK. The iOS SDK is an emulator that matches real world specs of an actual iPhone. Applications are tailored in the SDK to run on perfectly on iOS. This means that you will NEVER hear of someone complaining that an App can’t run on his iPhone because of insufficient memory or processor speed.However, you can never go wrong when comparing devices in the same ecosystem based on the processor speeds.  A 1.5 GHz HTC Flyer will definitely perform noticeably faster than a 500 MHz HTC Wild fire.

A phone is more than the hardware; a phone is also the user experience it provides. The next time you’re torn between phones, don’t rely on specs.  Take them out for a test run and then be the judge.

by Saisi