What Phone Is Good Enough in 2017?
Robert Triggs writes this review for AndroidAuthority.com.
Choosing the Right Smartphone
When you think about it, picking up a new flagship smartphone is a rather safe task. You’re virtually guaranteed to buy top notch performance, a good camera, and some swanky cutting edge features. It’s more of a question about what slight improvements one flagship offers over another, differences in design, and any particularly unique software features.
When it comes to lower cost handsets, there’s a much bigger minefield to navigate. Sometimes cheap processor components can ruin your day to day experience, the camera may take inferior looking pictures, and the software could be missing many of Android’s latest and greatest features. This guide will breakdown what to look for in a good low cost smartphone, to help avoid any disappointments.
Don’t Skimp on the Processor
Your phone’s processor is responsible for pretty much everything that it does and I would strongly argue that this is the key component to pay attention to if you don’t want to end up with a frustrating experience, waiting for apps that freeze on the simplest commands.
We won’t dive into too much technical stuff here, but one trend you’ll notice among lower cost smartphones is the prevalence of ARM’s Cortex-A53 CPU core, which is designed for low power consumption. On their own, these cores don’t offer a lot of performance, and I would say that even in quad-core configurations this design is a little slow for multi-tasking. The Moto E (2nd gen) I own often pauses for a second or two when switching apps. However, Android scales well with multiple cores, and octa-core Cortex-A53 processors offer snappy enough performance for most tasks.
As a general rule, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 617, MediaTek's P20, Samsung's Exynos 7 Octa series, and HiSilicon's Kirin 935, or better are all safe bets for good performance. But feel free to spend more for faster gaming and multitasking experiences.
An octa-core A53 design is the baseline that you should look for these days, and any processors boasting more powerful A57, A72, A73 or Qualcomm Kryo CPU cores will simply fly without worries, if you’re after that extra juice for multi-tasking and gaming. Gamers may also want to pay closer attention to the graphics processing unit (GPU) includes with the chip. Avoid mid-range and even flagship chips from 3 or 4 years ago, you can easily find superior midrange chips today.
As a general rule of thumb, processors from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 6XX series or above are going to offer smooth experiences for your day to day browsing and basic gaming. MediaTek’s P20 and X20, Samsung’s Exynos 7 Octa series, along with HiSilicon’s Kirin 935 or better are also perfectly suitable performers for the vast majority of regular use cases.
Memory, Memory, Memory
Alongside the processor, the other half of performance is RAM. Fortunately RAM is quite low cost these days, and you can easily pick up phones with 2, 3, and even 4GB on a reasonable budget. We would recommend 2GB as the bare minimum these days, but take 3GB for some headroom to ensure smooth multitasking, if you can get it.
For storing apps, pictures, music, video, and what have you, you’ll want a decent stack of flash memory too. The table below shows a breakdown of roughly what you can fit on various storage sizes, and if you pick up a phone with a microSD card slot you can further augment this space.
Read the full review at AndroidAuthority.com.
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Image source: http://www.androidauthority.com/what-phone-is-good-enough-in-2017-750136/
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