Saturday, September 28, 2019


The answer lies in the way you use your smartphone. If you are a heavy user who is constantly on their phone, you will need a smartphone that not only come with a big battery, but also super fast charging. On the other hand, if you only use your phone to take calls and send messages, a smaller battery in favour of aesthetics should also suffice.

Smartphones with up to 3000mAh battery
With Android applications becoming more and more resource intensive, it’s essential to have at least a 3000mAh battery powering your smartphone. That should at least ensure the phone lasts a typical work day when you take it off the plug in the morning and there’s enough juice left till you reach back home. 3000mAh battery is useful if you only use your smartphones for basic tasks like browsing social media and replying to messages. Now, if you are happy with a small battery, it becomes important to have a fast charging solution available. Phones that support at least 18W fast charging are reliable enough for a quick top-up before setting out on your evening’s engagements.

Smartphones with 4000mAh battery

Now, if your usage involves a fair amount of gaming, using navigation and the likes, a smartphone with a 4,000mAh battery is what you need. A 4,000mAh battery on a smartphone will ensure the phone should last well over a day depending on how heavily you use it. Here too, it’s important to have fast charging not because not only could you need it in emergencies, but a 4,000mAh battery without fast charging will take ages to charge to full capacity.

Smartphones with 5000mAh battery

A smartphone powered by a 5000mAh battery is essential if you are glued to your screen watching movies, playing games or shooting videos. With a 5000mAh battery, the smartphone will almost never run out in a day, no matter how you use it. It’s especially useful for creators and bloggers who would need to use the camera more often than not shooting videos in high-resolution. Even an avid gamer glued to games like PUBG Mobile will need a large 5000mAh battery so that charge doesn’t run out in the middle of the game. But here again you would need fast charging, something that is faster than the typical 18W fast charging most phones offer.

Smartphone cameras have fast replaced bigger point and shoot and for some, even more professional cameras altogether. Yes, some smartphone cameras are that good, but even if you see camera specs on paper that does nothing but impress, just know that all that glitters may not be gold. Here’s a quick guide that will walk you through all the important aspects of a camera setup and what to look for in a smartphone camera.

Megapixels vs. Sensor Size
There was a time when more megapixels was bad, but now we live in a time when more is good again. This is simply because unlike yester-years, where manufacturers packed more and more pixels into a tiny sensor, the imaging sensors of today are far bigger. Think of the relationship between megapixels and sensor size like that between the number of guests you invite for dinner vs. the size of your dining table. The table can seat 6 people comfortably, but if you tried to fit 10, there would be chaos. However, make the table bigger than those 10 people will have enough room to maneuver their cutlery. So yes, more megapixels are fine, as long as the sensor size is bigger too. This is why the 48 megapixel sensors we see nowadays are able to produce such good images, because these are half inch sensors. However, they use one more trick to make things look better.

Pixel Binning

Pixel binning is the science of combining information from four adjacent pixels on a sensor, into one, super-pixel of sorts. By utilising this trick, sensors are able to boost the quality of the final output significantly. This is how the 48 megapixel sensors are able to produce such stellar images. They combine 4 pixels into 1, thus reducing the final resolution to just 12MP, but bringing some eye-popping clarity, dynamic range and colours to your image. When choosing a smartphone camera, pick one where the sensor is natively capable of pixel binning.

Aperture

Now, no amount of software and hardware magic can get around one fundamental rule of physics that you need light to create a photo. The aperture is the opening in the lens that determines the quantity of light that the sensor receives in any given duration of time. The bigger this opening (aperture), the more light the sensor can gather in an instant and hence, the better images it can produce. A bigger aperture is especially helpful in capturing well lit photos in low light. The aperture of a lens is a written as a fraction, example, f/1.2, f/2.0, f/4.0. Therefore, the smaller the number, the bigger the aperture will be. For example, f/1.5 is bigger than f/1.8 is bigger than f/2.0.

Focal Length

Last but not the least, we’ve got the multiple lens setup. While smartphone cameras may not allow you to change lenses, some of them come with multiple lenses that offer a different perspective on the world. Some smartphones will offer ultra-wide lenses while some will give you telephoto lens in addition to the regular lens. We recommend choosing a phone that has all three if possible.
Make the right combination of choices when it comes to the above factors an you are almost guaranteed to end up with a smartphone camera that would easily take stunning photos in almost all situations.

RAM, or random access memory, is an essential hardware component that powers our smartphones. It’s essentially a form of storage  which is much faster than the internal storage in your phone. As and when the processor crunches and computes data, it’s easier to fetch the data from the RAM instead of the internal storage or ROM, which is primarily the reason why apps and games on your phones load in a second. In Android phones, RAM is used to keep an application or game loaded and ready to use. Apps remain in RAM long after it has been used, so you can go back to the app when you need it again.
The Android operating system will keep some RAM reserved to perform basic operations but Android is also designed in a way where most of the memory will be used up in keeping apps loaded in the background. A small portion of the RAM will always remain free for when the going gets tough. Recent updates have also made Android more intelligent in managing RAM. Apps that you use most frequently will be kept loaded in your RAM at all times, that is if there is enough RAM available in your phone.
Phones with 2GB to 3GB RAM will have issues in keeping large apps like Facebook, Instagram or Amazon loaded in the background for faster access. But a phone with 4GB RAM and above will not have much of a problem doing the above. Having said that, a phone with 4GB RAM is more or less just about enough to get through your basic tasks of browsing social media, taking photos and playing casual games. Multi-tasking might become an issue after prolonged use as there won’t be enough free RAM available to efficiently switch between apps.
With around 6GB RAM, multi-tasking becomes easier. If you are a power user who would take a photo, edit it on the go and share it, or keep switching between multiple tabs on your browser and a note-taking app, a 6GB RAM phone will be more helpful.
There are also phones that now come with 8GB to up to 12GB RAM. A basic user won’t really need all that much RAM. But if you crave for a flagship smartphone that remains blazing fast no matter what you do, you can go for the top variants of flagship phones. More RAM is never too bad, right? Especially if you are a gamer, an 8GB RAM phone would be a safe bet for smooth gaming.
With around 8GB of RAM or even 12GB RAM for that matter, you can keep your games pre-loaded for instant access. No need to wait for the game to load to start playing. Craving for a match? Just tap on the icon and you’ll be ready to play. We’ve seen this happen in case of PUBG Mobile where a flagship smartphone with around 8GB RAM would keep the game loaded at the main lobby screen. It’s quite fun to see everyone else wait for their game to load while you’re all locked and loaded.
Now, more RAM isn’t always useful. If you are not much of a heavy user, you will essentially be paying for RAM that will be left unused. Having said that, having more RAM doesn’t hurt. It keeps your device future-proof and running smoothly for years to come.


Display Type

The first thing to note about displays is the technology behind it. Is it an OLED panel? An LCD? Or a TFT display? Most high-end smartphones will come with an OLED or AMOLED display, while some continue to use IPS LCD displays. The primary difference between the two is that an OLED/AMOLED has pixels that individually light up on their own while in an LCD panel, there is a backlight that lights up the entire display, no matter what’s being projected on it. As a result, OLED panels are more battery efficient and can offer true blacks (since part of the display is not being used at all) which offers the best contrast ratio. LCD displays, on the other hand, can be used to jack up the brightness with a stronger backlight. High brightness is the primary requirement of HDR technology, which gives LCDs a natural edge. When choosing a display, decide based on your usage. If you stream videos a lot, an OLED panel will offer a better viewing experience due to its higher colour saturation.

Brightness

This is a no-brainer. You need a bright display. It’s the first thing that will strike you when you pick up any smartphone. Anything around 600 nits is good enough, but there are smartphones that push the brightness to over 1000 nits. High brightness is particularly useful when you are using the phone outdoors in the open sun, and it also aids in the display of HDR content.
You should also keep in mind the minimum brightness. While LCD displays can push up the brightness higher than OLED, the backlight prevents the brightness from falling below a certain level of illumination. OLED displays are more comfortable to use in the dark as they can go as dim as 1 nit.

Colour gamut
In order to determine the exact colour gamut of your display, you will need scientific equipment. However, suffice to say that if your phone has a panel capable of producing a minimum 98% of the DCI-P3 colour space, you should be fine. If you are a stickler for colour accuracy, we recommend looking at phones which also offer an sRGB setting in the display mode, as the sRGB colour space is what is most commonly used on the internet to display images and other content.

Resolution and aspect ratio

There are smartphones with 4K displays and there are smartphones with HD displays. Most high-end smartphones will offer a 2K or a QHD display. The exact resolution will vary based on the dimensions and the aspect ratio. With screens going bezel-less, the aspect ratio has been standardized to 19.5:9 which allows for two perfect squares when the screen is divided in the middle.

Refresh rate

This year, the refresh rate on smartphones also became a high priority. It used to be something to look out for in PC monitors, but the refresh rate of a smartphone display is equally important. Refresh rate is the number of times the screen can refresh itself in a second. The higher the refresh rate, the smoother everything appears to be. Videos shot at high frame rates are rendered especially well and so are the games that support high-frame rates like PUBG Mobile. Right now, the maximum refresh rate that is offered on a smartphone display in India is 90Hz. There are screens with a 120Hz refresh rate, but they are yet to launch in the country.

Touch response

Equally important is the touch response or the sensitivity. Touch is the default input to interact with the smartphone and a fluid touch response only aids in making the experience better. Touch latency of less a 1ms is ideal for gaming and fast typing.

Glass protection

What good is a bright and vibrant display if it cracks easily? The protection on top of the display is just as important as everything else. Most high-end smartphones are protected by toughened Gorilla Glass made by Corning. This specially made glass keeps the panel from shattering when dropped on a hard surface, and also helps prevent scratches. However, it should be kept in mind that nothing that’s made of glass is indestructible. It’s the degree to which it can protect itself that varies. In the case of smartphones, look for a display that has at least Corning Gorilla Glass 5 on top of it.