Picking the right phone is
straightforward either when money is no object, or when $200 is a huge outlay.
But in between those two extremes, decisions are tricky. We’re here to help you
find your handset partner
HAVING TROUBLE CHOOSING a phone? You’re not alone. If you look at the reviews we’ve
published over the last year alone, we’ve offered advice on more than 40
phones, but right now in New Zealand, more than devices are offered by
2degrees, Telecom and Vodafone. Rather than try to publish 50 phone reviews
here, we’ve discussed some of the ways you might want to use your phone and
which phones best suit those uses. Whether your passion is photography, art,
music, tinkering with your phone or just being connected to your friends, we’ve
looked at what phones are good at, and which phones are good at them.
Don’t worry, we’ve also reviewed them. Each
of the 40 phones we’ve considered has a full review on our website; you’ll find
the links in our table of features on page 60. That’s also where you should
turn if you just want specs, prices and ratings.
What to look for
Screen size
The size of a smartphone screen influences,
usually, the size of the keyboard that it can provide. You can get around the
limitations of a tiny phone screen a little by using a T9 keyboard rather than
QWERTY, or by using an alternative text-entry app. Swipe, which is built into
the Vodafone Smart II and Motorola Defy XT, lets you draw your way through a
word, dragging your finger from one letter to the next, simplifying the hunt
and peck pain of thumb-typing. On the other end of the scale, a 5-inch screen,
such as the one in the Samsung Galaxy Note, is almost too big. You may look a
little silly holding it up to your ear, but it does make for easy reading. A
phone with a 3.5-4.5-inch screen should be comfortable for viewing and typing.
Along with the size of the screen, consider the resolution.
The
Vodafone Smart II
Screen resolution
For budget phones in particular, the screen
resolution is vital to the overall enjoy ability of a smartphone. We suggest
checking out the screen in store before you buy text, in particular, can be
difficult to read at low resolutions on lower-quality screens. Check text
messaging, email and web to see how readable things are. Overall resolution is
measured in pixel density – the number of pixels per inch of screen (PPI). The
higher the density, the smoother and crisper the screen should look.
Responsiveness
We measure responsiveness in several ways.
We look at how fast can you complete a specific task such as reading a specific
folder of your email, how quickly you can move between home screens, how
quickly you can access settings and apps, and how fast web access is over 3G. A
number of factors are involved, including the processor type and speed, the
amount of RAM and the 3G capabilities, but you may be surprised to learn that
responsiveness doesn’t directly reflect any of those stats. While we haven’t
included specific measures of responsiveness in our table, the Speed category,
lists the most responsive phones we’ve tested.
Storage
In a budget smartphone under $400, storage
is at a premium, but most phones have the option of adding extra storage up to
32GB via microSD card. Phones costing more than $400 will almost certainly have
more than 2GB onboard storage.
Most apps take up somewhere between 1MB and
30MB of space, but it varies a lot. Facebook for Android takes up 29MB whilst
the iOS version takes around 10MB, for example. Some apps are much larger: the
game Monsters Ate My Condo on Android takes 58MB and Google Maps takes a
beefy 130MB. Consider that some phones we looked at this year have only 120MB
of onboard storage!
Check
before you buy whether the phone has a microSD card included at purchase
Songs take 5-10MB of space at medium
quality, and TV or movies take between 200MB and 1.2GB, depending on the
quality and length of the video. Books and magazines take between 1MB and
500MB, depending on the length of the book and number of photos included.
The OS itself also takes up space on a
Samsung Galaxy S III with 16GB capacity, 11.35GB is available for apps,
downloads, photos, music and other add on. On my personal Android phone, there
are 75 apps, including the preinstalled apps, which combined use 1.16GB.
Check before you buy whether the phone has
a microSD card included at purchase, as well as how much storage is on the
phone itself.
Battery life
It’s hard to assess battery life based only
on the battery capacity of a phone. Other things that affect the battery life
include the phone’s processor, its OS – memory management has a huge effect on phone
battery life differences and its other specifications such as RAM and GPU.
Since it’s a very difficult task to assess
the specifications and OS when you’re standing in the store, the battery
capacity is a decent starting point. Battery capacity is measured in milliamp
hours – mAh. A higher mAh rating is better than a lower one, but because the
phone’s display is the biggest consumer of power, if you find two phones with
the same battery capacity you can figure out which one will have longer battery
life by looking at its size and resolution.
We’d recommend looking for a large capacity
battery, a modern OS (such as Android 4.0) and a good rating in our reviews
online. Also worth mentioning is that the single biggest effect on battery life
is you: the way you use your phone can mean the difference between half a day
of battery life and five days.
Smartphone processors
There are five main models of processor,
and all bar Intel’s are based on chip architecture designed by UK company ARM.
ARM doesn’t actually make chips, it just designs them.
The two main designs in use are the
Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9, both of which use Arm v7 architecture. Sounds
confusing? Don’t worry, the only thing that’s useful to know is that A8 mostly
powers single processor phones, and A9 mostly multiprocessor phones.
What is confusing is that the speed
of a processor is no real indication of a phone’s performance, all by itself.
Instead, phones mostly use a System on Chip (SoC) design, which means that the
graphics chip, processor, RAM and ROM Work together. Each type has its own
strengths and weaknesses. The Nvidia Tegra is strong in 3D display and video
and the Samsung Exynos has strength in raw computational power, for example.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon and Apple A processor are the other two widely used
processor types right now. Intel has just released Medfield-based processors
which we’ll see more of throughout 2013.
The
Nvidia Tegra is strong in 3D display and video
We’re almost at the point where it makes
sense to assess the SoC, as well as the phones that are built from them,
especially since each manufacturer uses ARM instructions to build its
processors, and then layers on its own preferences and specializations. Each
SoC is different, in other words.
The good news is that this means
smartphones should get more distinct over the next couple of years, especially
in terms of how they function as tiny PCs.
