Mobile Phone specifications

05 Feb 2017 • Leave Comments

Gonna buy a mobile phone? Ha, you are probably trapped by vendor inspiring presenation! What invented you are not the reality. To pick up a reasonable mobile phone, please examinate specifications.

Summary

1. Hardware is not everything!

   iPhones' is relativly inferior to counterparts but the outcome is better.

2. You'd best buy a black version to hide black margin.
3. Phone at a discount might be substantially repaired ones.
4. Though most phones are produced by FOXCONN, final qualification determined by meta equipment, quality control, design etc.
5. Huawei's operating system is designed to prevent users from rooting! Think twice before upgrading.

6. Vivo/Oppo does not deserve the price.

   Vivo/Oppo/OnePlus share the owner. Oneplus focuses on users overseas.

Chipset/SoC

SoC consists of CPU, GPU, Baseband processor (BP, BBP) etc, of which BP is the most paramount, responsible for telecommunication.

1. Qualcomm Snapdragon (CPU) is better than MediaTek (MTK) Helio.

   Most processor vendors develop both CPUs and GPUs and tend to combine their own CPU/GPU in chipset (SoC). For example, Snapdragon CPUs are usually accompanied by Qualcomm Adreno GPU.

2. CPU model outshines number of Cores.

3. Pay attention to frequency, i.e. Snapdragon 820 1.8GHz VS 2.15GHz.

   Each core may differ in frequency, say 6 cores of 1.5GHz while 2 another of 2.00GHz.

4. 14nm/20nm.
5. GPU
   1. Qualcomm Adreno (embeded into Qualcomm SoC);
   2. ARM Mali;
   3. PowerVR SGX (used by many Apple product);
   4. NVIDIA Tegra;
6. BP is built-in or external? Support LTE user equipment category 6 (CAT6) / CAT7?

RAM/ROM

1. RAM - memory.
   1. LPDDR3/4
2. ROM - flash disk where OS resides.
   1. eMMc5.0/5.1/UFS 2.0/UFS 2.1
3. micro-SD card extension.

Battery

1. Charger. QC3.0/2.0/VOOC
2. 1/2/3A

Wireless

1. 80211b/a/g/n/ac wave1/ac wave2 (2-stream mu-mimo).

Camera

1. f/1.8, 2.0, 2.2
2. Optical Image Stabilization (OIS)
3. Phase Detection Auto Focus (PDAF)

Sensor

1. NFC
2. Ultra-red

Socket

1. Type-C USB 2.0/3.0/3.1
2. OTG