Phone Specs: Are They Still Worth Sweating About?

For quite some time now, mobile phones of all descriptions have been comparable to computers, that is, they have specifications that can be weighed against each other before purchase. Whether it’s RAM, processing speed, screen size, or storage space, a phone can be reduced to just a series of numbers – but do any of these nebulous digits actually make a difference?

Entertainment

Obviously, at the extreme end of things, a phone that lacks basic functionality will be useless at whatever it needs to do. It’s not easy to find a device this redundant though. Phones such as the rerelease of the Nokia 3310 are clearly marketed as “basic” devices, which means they have call and text functionality and not much else. 

Making matters a bit easier for frugal buyers is the fact that software is usually designed to be all-inclusive as far as phone models are concerned. In the entertainment world, the simple numbers game of bingo survived the transition to mobile phones without many memory-hogging changes. Paddy’s online bingo games continue to provide an experience that emulates the real-life game without slowdown on iOS or Android.

Similarly, experiences from the wider casino gaming industry require almost no effort from the device’s components at all, meaning that players can get involved even if they don’t know anything about their phone’s specs. Standard slots are almost invariably lightweight and easy to play.

These low requirements are likely deliberate, as games that seek to grab a part of an industry expected to top half a trillion by 2030 need to be playable by as many people as possible – and not everybody follows the release schedule that puts a new model on the market every two years or so. 

There are plenty of modern series that make their graphics central to the overall experience, which means that the requirements on mobile versions can be almost the same as on PC counterparts. As a point of comparison, the new iPhone 14 reportedly has 6GB RAM in all variants.

Android 9

What can make a difference is the type of RAM bundled with each phone. For instance, the latter device has LPDDR5-type RAM within its Pro version, which makes it use less power than the standard models, even though they have the same amount of RAM onboard. This upgrade only really matters for power users, as social media isn’t the most demanding of pastimes. 

So, why the frequent upgrades? This battle over hardware may be a throwback to the early days of Android, when extra power was a viable means to overcome software problems, such as lag. Once processors got over about 1Ghz in the late 2000s, this problem vanished. Still, bigger and better numbers can serve as helpful marketing material all on their own, which is why they’re still talked about at volume. 

Both Apple and Google impose false limits on what can and can’t be run on their phones, via software upgrades. Google stops supporting one Android version roughly every year, meaning that it can no longer receive security updates. Most recently, Android 9 or ‘Pie’ was depreciated, limiting how it can interact with the Play Store. Android Pie was released just four years ago, according to endoflife.date

So, should you worry about phone specs? Unless you’re a tech head or you’re going in especially early in the release order, it’s not worth the headache.

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Passionate about design, especially smartphones, gadgets and tablets. Blogging on this site since 2008 and discovering prototypes and trends before bigshot companies sometimes