Smartphone Details/specs- How it affects you_part 1

Often times when people ask me to help them with their choices of a phone to get, I let them know each phone specifications so they could make the choice themselves. But rather than helping them, I notice the confusion in their faces because they don’t understand what the phone specifications mean and how it will affect them when they get the phone in question. This post is to help people know the basic phone specifications and how it affects their user experience. I’ll to try explaining in the simplest terms possible.


Note: if you are already familiar with phones and know your way around, this post may not be for you (though it won’t hurt to refresh your memory and contribute).

Phone specifications are the details of components (hardware and software) in the phone, a detailed phone specification should carry these details and more:

·         The CPU (processor) Speed

·         The Memory (RAM)

·         The Storage

·         Screen Size and Resolution

·         Battery

·         Camera

·         GPU (graphics processor)

·         OS (operating system)

·         Sensors

·         Connectivity

THE CPU (processor) Speed: The CPU is the hardware that processes the entire job you give to your phone (playing videos, downloading, browsing or gaming). Basically the CPU handles these jobs. We can liken the processor to thee security official waiting in an entrance to check people going in. now if the people (task you give the phone) are more than what the security can handle he would definitely be tired and won’t work well, but if there are more security officials, they will be better able to handle more people. Same goes with the CPU, basically the faster the CPU (measured in GHz- gigahertz) the faster the phone. So from the illustration a 2 GHz CPU powered phone would download (and execute other tasks) 2x faster than a 1 GHz powered phone.

Note: Not everyone needs phones with superfast CPU speeds, some who only answers calls, read emails and surf the internet a little does not need a fast CPU as one who plays heavy games, download heavy files etc.

Single core vs. multi core CPU: You have probably heard of “dual core- two cores” or “quad core- four cores” or the latest iteration; the “octa core- eight cores” found on the galaxy s4. Basically these are multiple processors packed into one CPU. Now let’s go back to our security personnel illustration, a dual core in this situation would mean two security officials positioned in the security check point, a quad core would mean four of them, while octa core would mean eight security personnel. Now this means that the work load would be shared among each of them, thereby allowing for more work being done in less time and less effort by the personnel. So from the illustration we can see that more cores of CPU in a phone mean more efficient performance. So in summary, a 1.8GHz dual-core processor (CPU) is faster than a 1.8GHz single-core processor.

 

The Memory (RAM): The RAM (Random Access Memory) is the memory source where the CPU gets its instruction from to execute, for an application to run in a phone it has to be loaded to the memory (RAM) first. Now that’s a bit technical so let me use an illustration: take the RAM to be a desk where load is kept awaiting to be carried away by a small crane (CPU) Now the bigger the desk is, the more load (Applications) it will be able to hold at a time. The memory (RAM) is measured in Megabytes (MB) and Gigabytes (GB). On normal conditions a phone with 2 GB RAM would allow you to run more applications at a time than a phone with only 1 GB of RAM. If you exceed the maximum number of applications the RAM can hold, the phone would become slow and you have to close some applications.

Note: The amount of RAM in the phone specifications is not the amount of RAM accessible by the user as the operating system runs on a percentage of the RAM.

continue to part two...