Beyond the Hype: Decoding Smartphone Specs That Truly Impact Your Experience
On the bright side, you can’t really go wrong with any of the ultra-premium or mid-range top-end smartphones on the market today. But if you want the most bang for your buck, or if you’re trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in the mid-range segment, it’s still far too often a game of reading past the spec-sheet roses and seeing the spec-sheet thorns hidden beneath. And the only thing worse than wading through a product’s bathroom scale of a spec sheet might be the marketing syrup the competing brands like to paint over their otherwise substandard phones to make them look better. Virtual RAM, anyone?
But to help, let’s take all the confusing specs of a typical smartphone, and explain exactly what is important – and what isn’t – when deciding what to buy.
Decoding Smartphone Specs That Truly Impact Your Experience
Your phone’s brain: The processor
Good specs:
Snapdragon 8XX or 7XX series
Tensor, Exynos 2XXX, Dimensity 9XXXX
Ignore:
Undisclosed “octa-core” CPU
An old chip that’s nearing end-of-life
We start with the processor (or SoC) — the most and least important thing about your phone, at least if you go by the experience of the last few years: important, because even middle-of-the-pack handsets this year have the performance of flagship phones of yesteryear; but unimportant in that the features actually make their way downmarket slowly, if ever. If top-down performance plus features equals top-end phones, then a flagship chip is essential. But Ars Technica’s Ron Amadeo notes that ‘many of these features are unnecessary bloat on most phones’.
Rather, there are too many chipsets to enumerate, but practically any smartphone processor built since the turn of the decade is more than enough to handle major mobile use cases: checking Facebook, scrolling Insta, etc and so forth. Google’s Pixel line forms a series of smartphones that have no more than the guts of a mid-range processor yet deliver among the best mobile experiences in their respective price bands year-after-year. It is less about what your phone can benchmark and more about what it can do. Still, I’d advise everyone to steer clear of the bottom-end of the mobile processor market, if possible – the kind you’ll still find on some of the cheapest phones in the world. Anything that is advertised as little more than an ‘octa-core’ is likely still bad news.
Ignore core counts and GHz; you need to look at a chip’s broader capabilities.
After all, the iPhones all fly in with top-shelf chips, leaving little room (or choice) here anyway. If degrees of certainty about top-tier Android performance matter, fall back on the set of flagship-grade chips from the big players: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 series and 8S variant/line, MediaTek’s Dimensity 9____, Samsung’s Exynos 2____, and Google’s Tensor series – all rock-solid, even if you settle on something a gen or two back at this juncture. High-end mobile gamers will also get the latest features, like ray tracing, and the speediest figures on the latest chips (a phone with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, for example, fits the bill). Ditto for power multitaskers, and anyone who does a lot of shots or videos, and goes all AirDrop on their edits. Again, it’s those far-from-central use cases where an emphasis on processor as a component comes into its own, but even then, thermals and cooling is still something to factor in too. Bigger phones tend to fare better on that front.
On a tight budget, it’s perfectly reasonable to slide all the way down to the Snapdragon 7 or even 6 series, and MediaTek’s newer Dimensity 8XXX range as well: you will not feel second-class when it comes to networking or security, and even AI is starting to trickle down to these lower levels.
How does it handle stress, and does it have the gaming, AI or other features you’re looking for?
Sure they are small and have lots of interesting particulars to get brigade-level specific about, talking about each incremental difference in internal processor used. CPU core counts and overall microarchitectures for general processing or ‘plain’ (i.e., non-gaming) experiences; GPU cores for gaming and generally more graphics activity; ISPs (image signal processors) for pictures and video; and today’s latest areas of commercial innovation are NPUs (neural processing units; also known as app processors) for on-device AI crunching.
That’s all well and good, as an enthusiast exercise. Sure, we might want to mix and match our own CPUs, GPUs, ISPs, NPUs and so on in home-built PCs, but we can’t do that in today’s mobile phones. And which one of them would you choose anyway ? Would you buy a random high-flagship mobile phone thinking it might have a CPU core count of, say, eight ? Naaaaaahhh. It’s less painful to pursue the broader portfolio trends I’ve touched on above, and focus on the features the device can do on the device, then maybe look for a couple of simple benchmarks if you want to stay on the top edge of the curve.
In short: processor choice used to matter much more than it does now – but as apex gaming and AI start to move the dial back toward the flagship-tier chipsets once again, buying an apex computer can begin to make a more tangible impact on your experience.
Cameras, cameras, cameras
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Good specs:
Wide, ultrawide, and telephoto combo
Wide aperture on the main and tele
Good-sized sensors on all lenses
Ignore:
Counting megapixels
Ultra-long range zoom claims
Macro lenses
For many people, their smartphone is their only camera. It’s a constantly changing landscape of your modern smartphone. This task is not an easy one so let’s break it down by going through the terminology.
Megapixels — Better to have more?
Well, not necessarily. In theory greater numbers of pixels can mean greater detail because each pixel is receiving enough light for it to hit the sensor. In practice, however, more pixels in a given space means less light per pixel, which means a reduction of dynamic range, or an increase in noise, or longer shutter speeds. Not good.
The best modern pixel-binning sensors are clever, combining data from nearby sensels to endow the smaller, less light-hungry cell with ‘seeing’ power, without precluding high-resolution shooting – but you’re still most often stuck shooting with a default lower resolution. Keep in mind that 12MP is plenty for a 12-inch print anyway. Don’t let a 200MP sensor seduce you.
Sensor size —
Every megapixel flip corresponds to a unit jump in sensor size; the larger the sensor, the larger the individual pixels, and thus the better the light collection. 1-inch as large as we’ve seen on smartphones, though 1/1.3-inch is much more typical among primary cameras, and often much smaller in secondary and even tertiary ones. Anything much smaller than 1/2 is poor by modern standards, and will also pair poorly with high megapixel counts or low light. Bigger is always better, but that usually means a larger camera bump in exchange, and there are diminishing returns, with a 1/1.5 inch sensor or bigger being more than enough.
Aperture —
The widest of the ‘exposure triangle’, your aperture dictates how wide the opening of your lens is. Again, the wider (more open), the more light (good), but the more bronchitis (not so good). Don’t worry about this spec, but single-lens smartphones that can’t offer variable apertures are capable of very similarly wide settings to expensive single-lens cameras.
Very large sensors can cause partial subject focus issues (particularly at close range), and very wide apertures don’t make very sharp landscapes But the appeal of these mega-apertures is that they make cameras great in low light. Even worse, very wide apertures and very large sensors can cause Partial Subject Focus issues (particularly at close range), and very wide apertures don’t make very sharp landscapes.
Thankfully, variable aperture technology gives you the benefit of all worlds (shame it’s only available in the highest-exploit smartphones). Don’t worry about this spec, but if you’re inevitably drawn in and you see a smartphone lens spec that’s lower than f/3, then, for light conditions at least, the camera is going to be terrible.
Focal length (or simply ‘zoom’):
These are two sides of the same coin; find the focal length of two lens systems, divided, and you’ll have the zoom factor between them: a 75mm lens will therefore have 3x the zoom factor of a 25mm lens. Focusing distance: not so important unless you’re manually focusing the lens, which hardly any phone users do.
Speaking in sensible terms – ie, people not carrying around specialised revolving-lens-mounted beincam systems – if your phone has optical zoom identifiable on-screen at varying powers, go for it up to the best sharpness levels of that range: beyond it, the image will involve some form of software upscaling of the output, which is a big drop-off (and a very big hole between, say, 1x and 5x lens options). Focal length will also tell you something about what the lens is good for.
Below 20mm is enormous: it’s truly ultrawide, very good for general or landscape shots but rather making for weirdly distorted proportions. 35mm is the rough equivalent of the field of view of the human eye, 50mm or thereabouts is accepted as offering the most flattering portrait look, and 100mm and above would be a really long zoom. Disregard any other claims of 50x or 100x superzooms; they are always digital and completely terrible.
We could go more in depth about autofocus technologies (any wide lens you buy should have AF, at least!), backplane types and so forth, but I’m already getting out into the weeds here and it’s unlikely to sway your entire phone purchase decision except if you’re looking for very specific features. Next up is to see which camera lenses the phone has. These tend to fall into five broad categories: ultrawide, wide/primary, telephoto, periscope, macro.
Ninety-nine per cent of the time, the macro is there to fill out the numbers and rarely is it a dedicated macro camera. They’re low-resolution, tiny and bad. Pretend the phone doesn’t have one; you’ll probably forget about it. Having both wide and ultrawide is most common in the mid-range market and is a step-back in order to fit more in, but it loses out on long-range or truly portrait-friendly capability.
The other solution is to build a zoom camera: a telephoto and a periscope are two very different solutions to the same problem. Telephoto builds in a longer focal length, but does so in a very compact space and, as a result, you do sacrifice a little bit of light.
The periscope camera finds its space in the ultra-premium phones and works by bouncing light off of a mirror or two; it will give you a longer focal length than a telephoto but at the cost of still losing light. Many ultra-premium phones will do both types of zooms to cover multiple distances at a high quality. A 3x or 5x is good for portraits and close subjects; 10x is your concert stage. No real winners here – pick a phone based on what you would do with it.
How many GB of space do I need?
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
How many GB of space do I need?
Good specs:
256GB for multimedia
UFS4 storage type is the fastest
Ignore:
microSD card support (rare and often slow)
eMMC storage (slow and outdated)
Just like your processor, the amount of measurable space you’ll need (in gigabytes, or GB) to support your phone’s use depends on you and your habits. If you make calls, check your email and browse the same four sites every day, then a little room should do you just fine. But if you like to play three-dimensional games, take hundreds of pictures and collect memes on your phone, you’ll require a much more forgiving limit.
Notwithstanding that it’s still often the factory fit, 128GB isn’t terribly vast in the age of mass media and mobile photography. Shave away the size of the OS and some of the extra, built-in apps, and you might be fortunate enough to be left with a mere 80GB to play with, representing maybe 10,000 x8MB JPEG photos, 20,000 four-minute MP3 tracks, or 80 hours of compressed 1080p video. That might sound like plenty, but importing the years of previous pictures, plus everything else, taken from a phone that might have been around for several years at this point, will further reduce this. You can compensate for physical limitations to some extent with cloud storage, but this is, of course, an expensive long-term solution.
I would strongly suggest 256GB, at least it you’re the family photographer; if you want to err on the safe side, throw in 512GB, but God, the sticker shock.
The other factor is storage speed. While (just about) all the new flagships carry the fastest storage you can have – UFS 4 at the time of writing – budget models often have one of the slightly slower versions such as UFS 3.1 or even UFS 2.0. Mostly this will affect loading times for big apps or games, or the phone’s ability to record high-resolution (4K or 8K) video – something that budget models less require anyway. I’d steer clear of anything still being advertised with eMMC – that’s positively antiquated.
Dazzling displays
Ryan Haines / Android Authority
Dazzling displays
Good specs:
Dynamic refresh rate (1-120Hz)
HBM (High Brightness Mode)
High PWM rate
Ignore:
Peak brightness in nits
4K resolution
Niche HDR formats
As with any aspect of the multiple war, display technology has both pitched the senses against one another, and it has been a magnet for snake oil – as evidenced by the stream of folk wisdom we could get into here about area ratios, aperture ratios, contrast, sub-pixel layouts, refresh rates and other aspects of panel lore. Let’s hit those buzz words again.
Resolution –
Can you tell the difference between 4K and 1080p content, when you’re unspooling a streamed YouTube video on a 6in screen? I sure as heck can’t. Your phone probably sets an FHD+ software resolution by default, even when it technically has a QHD+ hardware panel – neatly sidestepping any power consumption problems as soon as you take your handset out of the box. An FHD+ resolution (or more than 1,920 x 1,080, depending on aspect ratio) is enough, even on a large form factor phone – anything beyond that is gravy. Don’t fret over the pixels.
Brightness –
Too pliable a metric to be particularly helpful on its own, peak brightness most often refers to brightness in nits: this is an extremely deceptive metric because it doesn’t tell you what it applies to and how persistent it might be. Generally, the largest number here refers to short-term – instantaneous – peak brightness in one tiny area of the image (such as viewing HDR content). Forget max specs of 4,500 nits. For chilled indoor viewing, you’re looking at a screen brightness of 200–300 nits; if you want to watch HDR video outdoors, go for 600–800 nits. More is a bonus, but not necessarily essential: even if you like to watch HDR video on a postage stamp, for instance, 1,500–2,000 nits is more than sufficient.
HDR —
Movie fans will rejoice in HDR, but its benefits are controversial on small screens often viewed in the worst possible environments. But most premium panels, and a growing majority of even mid-range ones, support HDR of some sort. Most panels support HDR10+ and/or Dolby Vision — pick your poison according to your preferred format.
AMOLED, OLED, whatevs – the battle has been fought and won, and it was OLED. A lot of even cheap smartphones now use some kind of OLED, be it AMOLED, POLED, flexible OLED or something else derivative in order to improve upon viewing angle, contrast and colour, but ultra-cheapo phones still use LCD and taking that hit in viewing quality should not be an option for you. Spring for the OLED panel if at all possible.
Refresh rate ̶
This spec can make a more meaningful difference to how your phone feels to use: a web page looks a lot nicer when you’re scrolling it up and down at 120Hz rather than 60Hz, 90Hz is a good compromise for mid-range phones. What you ideally want is an adaptive/dynamic refresh rate, with a display that can drop to as low as 1Hz in standby to save power when there’s no moving content to show. These are typically LTPO-type displays, which are premium offerings.
PWM rate —
Although the refresh rate specifies how fast the content on the screen is updated, the PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) is the rate at which the display flickers and dims so it looks darker. For the low percentage of those who are sensitive to flickering light, headaches can result even when the flickering is undetectable. This is especially apparent when you are in a dark room and dim the phone’s display. In this case, you want a high PWM value. A value in excess of 1,000Hz is good. But, don’t beat yourself up about this when you are not flicker-sensitive.
There is a whole lot of technology crammed into the latest smartphone displays, and what you choose will depend on what you need a display for: if you’re a doom-scroller or gamer, refresh rate will be way more important; if you’re reading on the commute, having a reliable and rock-solid outdoor peak brightness will be crucial; or if you find displays always aggravate any reading in the dark, opt for one with a higher PWM rate.
RAM: Don’t just download more
Good specs:
8GB+ LPDDR5X for multitasking
12GB+ LPDDR5X for AI/gaming
Further down the energy hierarchy is your phone’s volatile, or temporary, storage, also known as RAM (Random Access Memory). RAM matters, especially if you’re evaluating a phone for AI or gaming. For most human use cases of mobile multitasking, 8GB of RAM has been and is sufficient but, if you want to keep lots of apps or games open or even run Gemini Nano-style cutting-edge AI features, 12GB or more becomes useful.
Likewise, those demanding use cases demand fast RAM. As of this writing, LPDDR5X is the fastest type of RAM available, but LPDDR4X is totally fine for a budget model that’s more concerned with multitasking than loading up Genshin Impact.
There is a frequent gimmick to watch out for here, though: virtual RAM. You might also see this listed as Dynamic RAM, Memory Expansion, or something of the sort, but the idea is the same. This is what amounts to swap space, whereby unused apps dwell in a chunk of your main internal storage, instead of in RAM. That’s good for keeping more apps from closing if you’ve filled up your real RAM, but storage is miles slower than RAM, so there is zero benefit, performance-wise, for AI or gaming. Virtual RAM is helpful on phones with a small amount of real memory but only to an extent, and isn’t a substitute for real RAM.
More RAM is needed for an AI phone. Gloss over Virtual RAM, it is not the panacea.
With virtual RAM, companies can advertise a phone as having truly huge amounts of memory, like 24GB, but the split might only be 12 GB real RAM and 12 GB virtual. That’s OK, I suppose, but there’s not a huge benefit to virtual RAM when it comes in such mammoth size. Look at the details, especially when considering a mid-ranger since that’s where you’re more likely to see this trend, and make sure you’re buying one with a decent amount of physical RAM.
Charging power and protocols
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Good specs:
USB Power Delivery (PPS) support
Qi wireless charging support
We haven’t even got to soaring numbers, when it comes to charging power: that is one of the most explosive topics in recent memory, and it’s not just the rampant 100W and 200W claimed by Chinese brands that can have you fall foul of over-optimism: it turned out that the latest Google Pixel 6 was playing fast and loose with it, too.
But more power ist it? Well, yes, but the higher the power, the more accurate and more precise your measurement needs to be – are you at the plug or at the phone, how long can you stay there, and under what conditions? And if I had a dollar for every sub-two-minute phone I’ve tested that didn’t hit peak power for more than perhaps two minutes, well, I’d be middle-class, definitely. And if you live in a tropical country, these effects will be even worse. But even if you can get to 100W, so what if you are restricted to the block of an in-box or bricks from a single brand? Fast times and high power are great, but we also need to question battery durability, true charge times, and ecosystem and e-waste trade-offs.
Forget 200W, grab a phone that charges nicely with third-party plugs and power banks.
What matters most to me, though, is the speed of a phone’s charging via the so-called USB Power Delivery standard – specifically, if a phone is USB PD-compatible (or with the newer variant called USB PD PPS). If your phone plays nice with USB PD (and/or USB PD PPS), it’ll charge quickly from nearly any modern plug available. USB Power Delivery at 45W will get most big batteries from dead to full in just an hour or so, and 65W is properly fast for a phone and usable on many laptops. 30W and below is on the slower side but better than most of those proprietary brands listed above sitting between 18W and below when off of their magical mix of brick and cable. With regard to no-cable charging tech, a phone with Qi or Qi2 will play nicely with a number of options as well, although wireless charging isn’t nearly as fast as wired. Usually a Qi phone will charge as fast as any proprietary competitor.
Finally, battery capacity (in milliampere hours or mAh). This is a little too dependant on the handset size and accompanying specs to offer a definitive guide, but 4,000mAh should see most of us through one day, whereas closer to 5,000mAh is needed by gamers and heavy users. And, if there’s a chance you are a heavy user, you’re probably best off overestimating – a bigger battery is always better.
Maximum durability
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Good specs:
Gorilla Glass protection
IP68 rating
Ignore:
No-name glass protection
Water-resistance claims with no rating
Having got this far with the internals, you now need to consider your external hardware. Two things to balance here – screen/glass protection and water/dust resistance.
We have a guide to IP ratings. At a minimum, you want some degree of water protection. Stuff happens – and you will be thankful you went the extra mile and bought an IP rating when ‘someone’ spills coffee all over your new expensive piece of kit. We would argue an IP54 rating is the minimum a phone should get, with an IP68 rating the best you can expect when you part with your coin for an upper-mid and flagship handset.
Similarly, the occasional glass layer can mean ‘few!’ instead of ‘$100s’ down the drain, and hours spent in a queue arranging a screen repair. Corning Gorilla Glass is the lingua franca, Victus 2 and Gorilla Armor its strongest variants, but Apple uses Corning’s Ceramic Shield, which uses a similar if not superior hardening process, and there are a handful of other industry players offering their own flavours. Comparison between the various glass species is a fraught subject, but ‘new’ is better than ‘old’, generally speaking, so we’d generally suggest avoiding phones with anything more than a few years old if you can help it. Something is better than nothing, of course. Oh, and do make sure that there’s no difference between front and back protection, if your phone has a glass back. There usually is; what you don’t want to do is inadvertently trade down too far and find yourself with a smashed case.
I’d ignore any mention of all-metal construction entirely. Sure, metal might contribute slightly to a phone’s heft, but aluminium, titanium or otherwise, provide nary a clue to a given phone’s drop or bend-proofness, as has been proved again and again over the years.
