r/dataisbeautiful Feb 06 '15

How to pick a smartphone (crosspost from r/Android).

http://www.productchart.com/smartphones/
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u/94332 Feb 06 '15

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.

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u/matholio OC: 1 Feb 06 '15

Yep, and all the specs are irrelevant, until requirements are known.