Why the Smart Phone Spec War is Bad For Consumers

We reached some sort of inflection point recently, and no one really noticed when it happened. We were all living our lives, enjoying our smart phones, and life was good. Then all of a sudden we all took a collective look at the shiny piece of electronic bliss we carried around all day and thought, what's in there anyway, and does that guy have better stuff in his? As near as we can tell, this started happening around the time Apple launched the iPhone 3GS and touted it's much faster hardware. Before that, no one but hardware nerds (AKA our esteemed readership) cared about ARM chips. Now, consumers are being advertised to with more and more tech specs in the mobile space. 

When you think about it, that may not be the best idea. 
 

Mobile CPUs: the new gigahertz race

Many of us remember a decade ago when Intel and AMD were ramping up towards having 1GHz desktop CPUs. There was a psychological barrier that needed to be crossed. Maybe it was for the money, maybe it was for the recognition, but it wasn't about (at least primarily) the performance. Now we have 1GHz chips in cell phones. We will admit there's something that piques our nerd-lust  when we see those numbers, but are we just falling into a marketing trap? 

Many of these new high clock CPUs are fast, no doubt. Where we get hung up is the way companies are pushing us to crave new hardware with tech specs. Motorola recently announced they would be slapping a 2GHz ARM chip into an Android phone this year. Really? Is this really necessary? How much faster is this going to make a phone? There are so many other things that limit the usability of a phone. Memory bandwidth is limited, the screens are small, and the software can't keep up. 

When you experience a slowdown on a phone, it's probably a confluence of a number of factors, and the CPU is only one of them. Our chief suspect when a phone is slow is the software - not the hardware. We've seen slower phones, like an iPhone 3G for instance, clipping along at a reasonable pace, while a phone with faster hardware is weighed down by buggy software. When the Motorola Droid launched, it felt not quite fully baked. There were some strange stuttering graphical lags, and wonky home screen scrolling. This was fixed, but Google didn't swing by everyone's house and plug in a faster CPU. No, there was an OTA update to optimize the software.   

This 1GHz number is physiological in phones just like it was back in the day on desktops. The new round of Motorola phones will have 1GHz CPUs. Not Snapdragons like the Nexus One, but OMAP chips. There are  other OMAP chips with clock speeds that would probably be just fine performance-wise. But knowing the clock speed would be on the advertising, Motorola had no choice but to match the numbers of phones like the Droid Incredible which it will be sold alongside. 
 
Everyone knows the Nexus One, Droid Incredible, and other phones are running on a 1GHz CPU. Verizon even uses it in their marketing. We won't deny that either of these phones are fast, they are. But it's the software that makes them fast. The 2.2 update to the Nexus One noticeably sped it up with the use of a new Just In Time compiler. Apps run much better with this new software feature. The CPU was the same before the update, but the experience was much improved via software. It's misleading to push 1 and 2GHz chips as if it will really impact the experience when your actual usage is probably limited by software and other hardware limitations. A faster chip will drain the battery faster, so you don't really gain anything. 

This camera must be awesome, look at all the megapixels!

Cameras in smart phones are all about the specs. If it can't be easily communicated on the bullet point card next to the phone, it isn't important. Or so they would have you believe. There was a time when a 3.2MP cam was considered pretty good. Then came the time that a 5MP image sensor was the way to go if you wanted to get a consumer's attention. Now, here we are in a time when if a phone has that same 5MP camera, many prospective buyers will walk on by to find that unit with the 8MP camera. After all, manufacturers have assured us that more megapixels must mean better quality. 

But we know this is a fallacy. Higher and higher image size does not necessarily mean higher quality. Often, these sensors aren't getting any bigger when the megapixels are upped. That means images get more noisy. Another issue is the material the lens is made out of. It's usually pretty cheap, and you can't take good images without good optics. But how do you easily communicate the quality of the camera's optics to a person looking to buy a phone? Instead of figuring it out, they just make the megapixels higher again.  
 
One element of this mad dash that we do like is the move to auto-focus cameras. It's tough to imagine going back to a fixed focus camera phone. This change was ushered in by the same spec race, but it actually improves the experience. 

Apple seems to be the exception to this rule. The New iPhone 4 has a respectable 5MP camera with a high quality sensor designed to take better images in low light. The new back-illuminated image sensor produces amazing pictures, but isn't easy to put on a spec sheet. Apple can get away with this because they have a platform to talk to people with WWDC. They can explain their phone in detail most other manufacturers can only dream of. 

Spec creep continues with internal memory

This is more of an Android concern than anything else, but it further illustrates the problems that arise from the race to the spec checkbox. A number of big Android handsets have recently started including internal Flash memory for storage. The Droid Incredible has 8GB of internal flash memory. Previous Android phones only had SD cards. Manufacturers want to be able to list that their phone came with XGB of internal storage, like an iPhone. 

We love having more storage, but this course of action is an example of moving too fast to get that spec list fleshed out. Android has always relied on SD card storage. As a consequence, app developers have made apps that require access to an SD card. If you page through the Market, you'll see a number of apps that specifically say a SD card is required for use. Most apps just can't use the internal storage.  

Developers have no choice but to update to take advantage of this feature, and users are more likely to be confused as to why some apps aren't working. Verizon was good enough to throw in a 2GB SD card, but that's not a lot of space. When the Droid launched, they threw in a 16GB card. The 2GB freebie is an afterthought and the whole thing shows you how specs can work against people. 

Bigger numbers hit the screen

We would not argue that a larger screen phone is desirable to some people. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of people just can't comfortably use a phone of this size. But it looks super good on paper, right? iPhone, 3.5-inches. Droid X, 4.3-inches. Wow, the Droid X wins, right? Well, we'd venture that the iPhone has the more desirable screen thanks to its higher resolution. But pixel density is harder to explain in the context of a cell phone retail environment.  

A bigger screen isn't what everyone wants, but that's what manufacturers are giving us. We freely admit to drooling over these 4.3-inch phones when they make the scene. We just hope that the trend toward larger phones doesn't take the entire high-end with it in an attempt to communicate an advantage. Otherwise, we'll all end up with Dell Streak-size slates that won't fit in our pocket and have mediocre pixel density. 

Why an HDMI?

This is a feature we've just started seeing recently. This feels to us like another example of checkbox mentality. They just want to be able to say they have it. If you see yourself constantly needing to hook a phone up to a TV, then that's a really useful feature. But are the vast majority of people ever going to take advantage of this? If they do, will it make them want to do it again? 

The execution has not been very good as of yet. The rush to get this feature (even if it is of questionable value) has resulted in a poor experience. The performance of high resolution video on the Evo 4G is reportedly lacking, though videos rendered closer to the Evo's native 800x480 resolution tend to perform better. There are also no real settings for the video out. You can only play stored videos and YouTube. So other apps can't output video through the HDMI. 

This could be a good feature in the future, but phone makers need to back off on this until it actually works well. Like them or not, this is something Apple does well. They don't usually adopt a technology until it is ready. 

Despite what we might think, the mobile hardware race is probably going to continue. Handset makers will keep trying to impress you with the raw specs. We just suggest you try to be objective about the feature set. Look at the functionality of a phone. Try the hardware and look at the screen to see if it feels like a solid experience to you. Consider battery life versus hardware speed. You might not be losing any real benefit by sticking with a 1GHz chip when the faster ones come out. So much of the performance that matters to you is tied up in the software. We like to see new CPUs in phones, but it's not the only consideration. We want to see more focus on optimizing the software, not giving us new hardware that outpaces the old.