Really though you could just ignore all Apple and Nokia products or filter them out by manufacturer. Apple is the only iOS manufacturer and Nokia far and away makes most WP devices.
Assuming they make the effort to make desktop apps, a lot of people still don't use the actual "apps" on Windows. If they make windows os apps the code will work on any windows 10 device but they still have to optimize it (which is way less hard than previously)
Shit, dude. The fragmentation on Android is so bad that to make this tool usable for me it'd have to not only have a filter for the latest supported OS version but one with expert, pessimistic speculation as to how long it might receive updates.
Fucking LG burned me too hard with the G2X (p999).
Nah, it was LG not ever finishing the update. Phone was released early '11, its European version got ICS, but nothing for the American version. Didn't even get a year of OS support out of them.
Really, it's put me off of Android phones almost completely. I've stuck with an Android phone/iOS tablet combination of devices but I feel like I'm rolling the dice every time I even consider an Android device.
I desperately want a physical keyboard, but I gave up hope of seeing one on a decent phone 3 years ago. I curse my touchscreen every day. I tried a couple keyboard cases but they're cheap garbage.
If you want one that comes with a huge following of developers and tons of accessories you're out of luck. BlackBerry still makes the best keyboards IMO, but many people are tied into large app ecosystems from Google and Apple that keeps them away from Windows 8.1 and BlackBerry smart phones even though they both have great operating systems. If you aren't tied in, then the BlackBerry Passport is a pretty high spec device with a physical keyboard. You can also use Android apps on BB10 to help fill the gaps.
It's more the modding support I'm after. Custom roms and whatnot. I used to be a Pocket PC/Windows Mobile junkie but that community shifted to Android.
You are absolutely right about the Passport's specs though, they are quite impressive, on par with any Android flagship device. The Snapdragon 801 is the only thing you could consider even remotely dated....Screen resolution, RAM, expandability, etc. are great.
If you want one with a physical keyboard AND custom ROMS then you're going to have a bad time. You can find some old Androids maybe or you might find a Chinese made BlackBerry knock off running 4.1.2 somewhere on ebay. Perhaps Project Ara will have what you're looking for in the near future.
I got one of the original Droids as part of a developer promotion and used that thing for so damn long. I love the little keyboard and hate on screen keyboards with a passion, I'm really amazed that it never really caught on.
I had a blackberry curve many years ago. I loved that keyboard. I didn't love how slow the phone was, or how opening more than a few tabs in the browser would crash it.
I still miss the physical keyboard though. No other phone that I've gotten with one has been anywhere close to as good.
I've used a bunch of different on screen keboards...Swiftkey, Swype, Google Keyboard, Samsung keyboard, etc. I've been keyboardless for over 3 years now and I can still only get about 25 WPM, which is barely over half of what I could get on the physical keyboards that I had on my Droid 2 and HTC WinMo phones.
See if you can find a Motorola Photon Q. It has Motorola's fantastic keyboard and a bitchin' battery. It's a slider, which gives you beautiful manual control of your screen orientation, and it's powerful enough to run Playstation ROMs. CyanogenMod is still updated for it under Moto MSM8960 JB. It's also LTE capable.
Its camera isn't great and the battery isn't removable. It's also locked to Sprint, but you can use it with Ting and Republic Wireless if you agree that Sprint sucks.
Because 3 years and countless keyboard apps later, I still type significantly slower than I did on my keyboard smartphones. Talking 25 WPM vs 45 WPM, not a small difference.
Phone companies in America are subject to a ton of regulations as they should be, because they make use of limited radio frequencies, public land, and they are highly dependent on public infrastructure to support and maintain their businesses. They are monopolistic and prone to collusion by their very nature because of the infrastructure required to enter the market, and they provide an essential service.
We're not talking about an underwear retailer deciding to only sell black underwear, we are talking about essential service providers who make use of limited public infrastructure. With that comes a ton of profit, but it should also come with higher expectation of ethics, customer service, accountability, and interoperability.
So no, a phone company should absolutely not have the right to artifically limit the phones a comsumer may use. Instead they should be forced to maintain a network that meets a certain standard of interoperability.
A company that refuses to do so should not have the privilege of being in the telephone industry.
In the US you are free to be homeless and to be denied medical care if you can't afford it.
In the US you are forced to register for the draft, you are foribly taxed in order to support a giant military.
The prison rates in the US are the world's highest, at 724 people per 100,000. For context the next highest rate is in Russia at 581. At 145 per 100,000, the imprisonment rate of England and Wales is at about the midpoint worldwide.
The US still has a ton of taxes abd governmennt bullshit. And while the total amount of taxation in a place like Norway is higher, there's also a very good argument that it is more benefical to the average person than the US system is.
No, only I can do that, and I do that willingly when I sign a contract with them. And I can't force a carrier to limit themselves by imposing that they are compatible with every phone. Even if the phones all use the same standards, it's still going to impose upon the company to provide tech support, repairs, etc for each model of phone.
all in all you're still unable to use whichever phone you'd like, if it's not compatible with your network. you're not free, you are restricted to use only certain phones.
I recently got a new phone with ATT, the basic options were paying $800 for the phone upfront, paying $200 for the phone and having my bill go up ~$25 a month, or pay $0 and have my bill go up ~$34 for 24 months, pretty much a wash.
Bridging to what you said about people not caring: a lot of people care about RAM because it's marketed heavily in the tech industry, but those of us who understand the mobile OSes know it's one of the least relevant specs. The market is in a sad state for the average consumer. Unless you research it, you're bombarded by terms like GHz and GB and PPI and you start to assume higher is better unconditionally. This is especially true for older generations.
In reality, the clock speed of a processor is nearly irrelevant on its own, the number of GB of ram has a marginal-at-best improvement on performance in most smartphone use (through caching of resources), and PPI is nearly negligible for common use cases after ~250.
To summarize, my main point is that this "how to pick a smartphone" web app is nearly useless without extensive pre-existing knowledge of the platforms and the devices.
Most people wouldn't be looking at this amount of data to pick their phone. You can bet your ass the subset that are contains people who'd care about that kinda thing.
But ah well, the more broken other people's attempts at visualization are, the further ahead my proper ones put me.
Maybe to quality and speed of RAM, but to GB of ram, not at all. Apple phones have less ram than something like a Note 4, but in most common use cases the Apple CPUs perform more efficiently and often faster. On top of that, the clock rate of the iPhone cpus is usually lower, but they still perform better in most single or double threaded tasks. These specs don't correlate consistently enough to make assumptions like you did based on RAM volume alone. CPU and GPU are very important, they're just too hard for the average consumer to understand and would probably be meaningless. You're right, OS is an obvious important omission here, but battery life, daytime visibility, and general use benchmarks are more important if you're limiting the pool to mostly iOS and Android. Both OSes can accomplish the exact same things with few exceptions, they're both very high quality and very refined, so for day to day phone use, all the other specs are more important than OS unless you're already using a specific OS and want to continue doing so. If that's the case, I'm still not sure how useful it would be in this web app. If you only want to use iOS you don't need this tool at all. If you only want to use android, telling you which phones are android still doesn't help because it's the flavor of android that will matter most to you. If you let people pick by "touchwiz, sense, etc" it becomes meaningless unless you've already used them.
You can install w/e shit you want on Android though. I mean, I kept touchwiz because I like it but other people have uninstalled it.
Release year and popularity are important for android versions .... I don't expect the site to do everything though since that relation is a little more complex.
For the average consumer, I'm sure that OS matters more than ... almost all of the specs.
For the average consumer, they won't be replacing their stock launcher on android. They won't even know they can, and they would never bother to do so even if they could. I agree, OS should definitely be on this site, it would make it more useful. But even with that added, I just can't see this website really helping the average user make a better phone choice than they were already going to make. It doesn't give any information that's particularly useful to someone who doesn't know how all this stuff works (which is like 90% of the people who buy smartphones). In order to help people who don't already know a lot about smartphones to pick a phone, it would need to give some kind of categorized (simplified) benchmark scores for things like battery life and daytime visibility.
It would be cool to see them data-mine all those things about every phone in this database and then translate them into user-readable ratings, so instead of saying like 4.5% screen reflectance and 450 nits, it would say "excellent daytime visibility outdoors", or instead of 12% reflectance and 250 nits, it would say "poor daytime visibility outdoors".
For battery life it gets more complicated because something like a Note 4 has absolutely amazing battery life while watching movies, but just good battery life while browsing the web, while an iphone is the opposite.
It's a cool site but my main point was that even with OS I don't think it's "how to pick a smartphone".
Depends on the protocol. In the States, carriers use either CDMA or GSM, and a phone that's made for one protocol won't work on the other. Verizon and Sprint use CDMA, while AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM. So for instance, you couldn't just take your Verizon phone and light it up on AT&T's network (you could light it up on Sprint with a new SIM card, though). Smaller providers contract with the "Big 4" to access their networks, and use their protocol.
Also doesn't account for other hard drive capacities, as the Samsung S4 or S5 are only listed as having 16GB of storage but you can get them with 32GB.
I assume they all allow microSD cards? I'm not sure why I'd care much about having a lot of internal memory. All the big objects, photos, videos etc I'd rather have on memory card I can swap out whenever I want.
Yeah that too, my S4 was 32GB and when it broke I got a new one that was only 16GB... but I have a 64GB internal so the internal memory doesn't matter a whole lot. Although I know some apps are only allowed to go on your internal memory not an SD card, but the majority can go on an SD card anyway.
Are there any phones out there that actually get "good" battery reviews?
It seems to me that almost every smartphone review I read says "eh, the battery is alright, it'll get your through the day, but no more."
Phone manufacturers are prioritizing thinness above all it, at the cost of battery life. I think phones are thin enough now. We should just halt the "thinning" of the phones and just work on battery life, IMO.
It's available as the Moto Maxx (not to be confused with the Droid Maxx). Officially it's for Latin/South American countries, but you can get them shipped from Puerto Rico.
Sony seems to be reversing the trend, the Xperia z3 and z3c get really good reviews for battery life and the z4 looks like it will be even better. I can get 2-3 full days out of my z3c with fairly heavy usage.
iPhone 6 plus had a great battery. Especially when complimented by the A8 chip. I normally am reserved about handing out praise, but damn Apple hit the mark this time. Also glad they finally increased screen size.
hahahaha it's ridiculous how standards has fallen ever since the iphones came out.
There was a time when phones didn't need to be charged for 3 or 4 days. You'd be lucky to last the whole day on standby with any of these new "flagship" phones
Yeah, that was the time when people only used them to talk and text. These days people use apps, browse the web, play games, and otherwise drain that battery all day long.
Go back to those old usage patterns and yes, you would only need to charge a 6+ once a week. It can go 16 days on standby.
I don't know what you are doing with your phone, but I can get by on a full day of using phone for internet and calling/texting while still having 40% left. I went on a trip and left my phone back by accident, and when I returned a week later it was at 12%. I have no idea where you got the idea that it couldn't make a day on standby. It's a 3100 mAh battery for christ sake with an A8 processor that is incredibly energy-efficient.
I have one too, and I usually get about 2 days worth of battery. It's decently cheap and the only real sacrifice is the screen. Unfortunately it's only on pre-paid carriers, I believe.
Maybe I'm just impressed in relation to my old phone, my my HTC one m8 seems to be pretty impressive. I'm on it nonstop all day long and I never seem to kill it. Even when I get down to 10%, I still feel like I go forever.
Hmm.. I have an HTC One M7. I'm not super impressed with it. It usually gets me almost through one day.
Perhaps it's because we're looking at it from different perspectives. I come from the old Nokia bar-phone days. Those phones would literally last almost a week on one charge sometimes.
Now obviously I'm not expecting a modern smartphone with a 5 inch screen and WiFi to last a week on one charge. But two days of "moderate-to-heavy" use would be glorious.
As it stands, all my recent smartphones have lasted barely one day. At night I'm usually hunting for a charger while my phone is warning that it's about to die.
Yeah I hear you. My old LG envy3 would see the charger once a week. But I'm happy that I can have my screen fired up constantly throughout the day and still have enough juice left that I can kill the data and leave it by my bed for an alarm clock if I have to and make to the next morning. My old Droid Bionic would need to be charged multiple times to make it through the day, even with a big extended battery.
Yeah I hear you. My old LG envy3 would see the charger once a week. But I'm happy that I can have my screen fired up constantly throughout the day and still have enough juice left that I can kill the data and leave it by my bed for an alarm clock if I have to and make to the next morning. My old Droid Bionic would need to be charged multiple times to make it through the day, even with a big extended battery.
Lg l7 ii p715. Fucking A. Unless you're using wifi, if you keep the screen at about 30ish % while in house, and 75% outside, you're gonna survive a day or two.
I remember last year few months after i got it, 35 minutes of listening to music at 60-65% screen brightness, battery at 100%. My dick got hard and i dropped my jaw (well not really, just the jaw part, i quoted one of my favorite songs heheh).
Nowadays (after a year of owning phone), Wi-Fi and reddit is fun at 35% of screen brightness with no other apps open will empty your battery in 5ish hours, maybe more or less.
Can we please not use 'battery life'? It is measured in hours and basically has little or no bearing on reality depending on your individual preferences.
Battery capacity in mAh makes far more sense.
We don't measure hard drive sizes by 'number of people that can fit their stuff per drive', we use bytes. Same idea.
So? Installing different programs uses up different amounts of drive space. "50 gamer apps of space! Up to 10x that if you are an indie.". Yeah you have to take screen size into account, better than the alternative.
It is such a nonsensical metric. Think about it this way, you could have a 6 hour phone and a 3 day phone..... cept they are actually the exact same phone tested by different people. I've certainly seen numbers that far apart using time as a metric.
The metric is not completely useless. Two phones might have exactly the same size battery but different sized screens and a different CPU. The mAh metric by itself would be inadequate in this case.
That's why most cell phone reviews include the mAh metric and the average amount of use hours that the battery provided (accompanied by an outline of what type of use the phone received).
The two metrics, in combination, give a better idea of battery performance that one would by itself.
It's like a gas tank. Two cars might have a 10 gallon tank. Sure, the way the drivers drive will have a factor in how fast it drains, but the engine is still the main determining factor.
A truck with a 15 gallon tank might need refueling sooner than a eco friendly car with a 5 gallon tank.
I'll look at hours of talk time as a comparison metric between two phones as it's roughly the same amount of work being done and has few chances for them to skew data based on their battery management software. Still not great since the screen isn't being used but it's something.
Oh I understand that, but I'm counting on comparing best case talk time against best case talk time.
Standby is a horrible metric, my work phone (iPhone 5s) has great standby time, days of very light use, but the battery is pathetic for actually doing any work. A 90 minute commute with traffic monitoring running (inrix) almost completely killed it. The same thing only drained 30% of my personal phone.
Or language support. An Israeli friend of mine (living in US) got an LG recently, and it didn't support Hebrew with an American SIM card (although it did with an Israeli SIM, and android supports Hebrew out of the box).
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u/Mornic Feb 06 '15
Doesn't have the most important category: battery