In the past few years Smartphone technologies skyrocketed. It’s practically started with Apple’s iPhone and then it became a “Smartphone Fever”. Lots of other competitors came in to the game such as HTC, LG, Samsung and Sony. Some of them were already in the game and accelerated their innovation to be the king in Smartphone world.
But for most of the customers, it’s a freaking nightmare. They can’t decide which Smartphone to buy. There are various brands and models with different marketing jargons. The worst part is there is a wide price range from $150 to $1200. It’s very difficult to figure out what is the Smartphone which fits for you and your needs.
To worsen things more, you buy a high tech piece of equipment just to follow the trend, but you don’t really need it for any of your day to day work. So after few weeks it becomes just another phone for you and a huge waste of money.
To save all the trouble for you, I decided to write this series of articles with the name Smartphone Buyer’s Guide to make it easier for you to pick a good Smartphone with good features for good price which exactly does what you need. Today I’m going to talk about Processing Power.
Quick Catch-up
Read Technical Specification
It’s really important for you to read technical specification of the Smartphone rather than going after marketing materials. There you can find important features of the gadget which decide whether it fits for you. But the next big question is, most of the people doesn’t know the meaning of half of the words which is there in technical specifications published in manufactures websites.
So we are trying to break them down and understand one by one. As I mentioned before today our focus is processing power which is the most important factor in any Smartphone.
Processing Power
When you are reading the technical specification of processing power there are four main things you have to pay attention to.
- Chipset: Platform that processor runs on.
- Clock Speed: How much work that processor core can do in one second.
- Core: How many processor cores are there.
- GPU: What is the processor dedicated for graphical functionalities and here clock speed and cores come to the picture again.
The most powerful Smartphone would be the one which is having latest and advanced chipset, very high clock speed, maximum number of cores and most powerful GPU. One example is shown below.
- Nvidia Tegra 3 Chipset and 1.5 GHz Quad Core Cortex A9 with GeForce GPU.
Above example is having Nvidia Tegra 3 chispet which is the latest and most powerful, then 1.5 GHz clock speed which is very high. It’s having 4 CPU cores which give you 4 times of power and GeForce GPU which is having 12 graphic processing cores.
If you are a heavy gamer you have to go for a Smartphone like this. But if you are mainly doing web browsing, email checking and eBook reading this is way too much for you. In that case consider below specification.
- Nvidia Tegra 2 Chipset and 1GHz Dual core cortex A9 with any average GPU.
Nvidia Tegra is the most popular and stable chipset, but there are more.
- Apples A5 and A5X comes with iPhone
- Exynos comes with Samsung Galaxy S II
- Snapdragon comes with Asus Smartphone
GeForce is the most popular GPU in android world, but again there are more.
- Adreno comes with Asus products
- Mali-400MP comes with Samsung Galaxy S II
- PowerVR comes with Apple iPhone
When it comes to processors you should know only about ARM. All the above mentioned phones come with that. Normally in technical specification it will state like Cortex A9 etc. Only thing you have to worry about is its Clock speed and number of cores.
I hope this explains you most of the marketing jargons in Smartphone processors. Now you can make a list of things that you would do with your Smartphone and find out the processing power needed to perform them. Then you can decide what sort of Chipset, Clock Speed, Number of Cores and GPU you need.
If you still are feeling lost, drop a comment here and get good help from Notes of Genius community. We are here to help you to buy the best Smartphone which is an exact fit for you, your needs and your pocket.
See you soon with next article which is Storage options in Smartphone.
Tags: #Smartphone