Happy weekend!
There has been a lot of news related to benchmarking lately, including an admission by Google that they blocked Play Store downloads of benchmarking apps during the Pixel 8 review embargo, as well as fresh chips coming down the pipeline by Qualcomm and MediaTek.
Discussion questions:
- Do smartphone benchmarks matter?
- Are they still a useful reference and do you consider them when shopping for an upgrade?
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Do smartphone benchmarks matter?
Probably, but not for me.
Are they still a useful reference and do you consider them when shopping for an upgrade?
No.
What do you prioritize instead?
Camera, battery life, size, screen, software features/bloat (in no particular order)
Battery life and screen quality first and foremost. They’re often related to each-other. Battery life because I feel it’s the one aspect that hasn’t improved very much at all over the past 10 years, and if I don’t have enough battery, I literally can’t use my phone. Screen quality because I look at the screen whatever I do with the phone, so if the screen is bad, everything else cannot make it a better phone.
Storage space, support cycle, type of screen, third party OS support, aftermarket accessories, camera quality. Size.
Also kinda part of the SoC, but the frequencies supported since I travel a lot.
I think phones have been fast enough for a while now. There’s more to a SoC than speed. When I came back to Android, I went from the fastest iPhone to a SD480 with only 6GB of RAM and it was…fine for daily use. But the camera was a big letdown on that device so I got something a little bit better a year later.