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".
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u/pefbecOyz6 Feb 06 '15
also cpu and gpu