How to choose a cell phone?

We spend more time with our cell phone than with our family. In fact, we use it to communicate with them, and for many it is an essential work tool.

A cell phone, whether you want to admit it or not, is a life companion that, depending on the relationship, could accompany you to the bathroom for several years. Possibly for many readers, this relationship is more significant than any romantic relationship, including today’s marriages, which is why it’s good to know how to choose well.

If you go for the most expensive phone, say today an iPhone 6s or a Samsung Galaxy S7, you’ll surely be happy, but for what they cost you could buy a phone that makes you just as happy, a TV, and a PlayStation 4.

To choose a phone well, you need to know what you want to get out of it, or at least what use you want to give it. In the end, a phone is a sum of features. The details of all these can be found on gsmarena or for the national market (Chile) solotodo is an excellent source.

I’ll comment on each of the main features of a phone, explaining what you should look for.

Screen: The first decision to make is what screen size you want. If you’re going to use the phone a lot, I recommend a large screen, at least 5 inches. If you’re not very addicted, try not to go below 4 inches; anything less makes using the keyboard difficult.

Screens aren’t just about size; they can have different resolutions, brightness levels, technology, and even build material (glass).

Resolution is a double-edged sword. More seems better; more pixels means it looks nicer, but it also means more work for the phone to tell each pixel what color to light up. For example: a normal phone today has 1080p, which equals 1080*1920 pixels, at 60 images per second that’s 124,416,000 pixels per second, while a 720p screen only has 55,296,000 pixels per second. The second one looks similar to the first but uses less than half the power and therefore less battery. I recommend not going below 720p; 1080 is very beautiful but is only for high-end phones, and more than 1080 is cutting yourself with the enemy’s edge of the sword.

Screen technology can be LCD or LED. Basically, it refers to how the light that makes it shine is generated. Each technology has its pros and cons. LED is brighter and consumes less battery, while LCD shows more realistic colors. I personally recommend LED technology, but I don’t rule out LCD.

The glass used to build a screen prevents it from scratching. Better glass can even withstand a knife, but no glass saves you from a drop. For scratches, I recommend that the phone have glass called Gorilla Glass (the type of glass is on gsmarena), but for drops, I recommend sticking a protective film on it and choosing a phone where the screen doesn’t go all the way to the edge, or putting on a bumper protector. In other words, I don’t recommend the Samsung Galaxy S6/S7 Edge.

Storage: This is the capacity to store apps, movies, photos, etc. The operating system uses about 4GB, so if you have an 8GB phone, you’ll only have 4GB free for your music and apps. I recommend not going below 16GB, and if you want to have a lot of photos, movies, or music, but not as many apps or games, you can look for a device with memory expansion via Micro SD.

Operating System: If your choice is Apple, stop reading here; you already have the information you need. Apple only offers high-end phones and you can only choose the screen size and storage. If you’re open to using Windows Mobile, I recommend checking if the apps you want to use are available. Meanwhile, if you’re someone who seeks freedom and uses Android, you should look for one that has a clean or vanilla Android (with few additions from the company) and with a recent version of the operating system. (Google works version by version to improve the performance of the green robot system.)

Power: Phones are like computers; they have endless components that determine their performance, but the most significant are: Amount of RAM and CPU.

RAM is easy to explain: the more, the better. Basically, RAM is the memory for processing. For example, you open an image on your phone; it gets processed and stored in RAM, from where the phone can display it on the screen. But if you have spare RAM, the image won’t use it and you’ll have idle capacity. A good phone today comes with 2GB of RAM, while a high-end one comes with up to 4GB. Today I recommend not going below 1GB and leaning toward 2GB or more.

The CPU is a tricky beast to explain. A quad-core (four processors) can be much less powerful than a dual-core (two processors), and more GHz (speed) doesn’t always mean better performance. Furthermore, names say little. For example, between a Snapdragon 801 and an ARM A72, do you know which to choose? The Snapdragon 801 sounds much more powerful, has a nice name and a bigger number, but the correct choice by far is the ARM A72.

How do we solve the CPU problem? Very simple. Since this isn’t a new problem, there are stress tests—just like the physical education tests where you ran until you couldn’t anymore—the same exist for phones. These tests are called Benchmarks; they give a comparable number between devices. The most popular of these tests for Android is Antutu. On Google it’s very easy to find the result for any phone model. To give you an idea, a low-end phone would get around 17,000 points, mid-range: 30,000, high-end: 60,000, and the newest ones (ARM A73) achieve 130,000. I recommend aiming at least a bit above 30,000.

Battery: The battery is what gives life to our mobile toy, and how much life it stores is measured in mAh. The more mAh the phone’s battery has, the longer it will last. But saying how many mAh is enough is a difficult question, because not all phones consume power the same way. The best thing is to search for a battery test of the device you’re interested in on Google. What no battery escapes is its lifespan, and although there are ways to make it last longer (like avoiding discharging it to 0 or avoiding exposure to heat), all batteries go to heaven in about 3 years. It’s good to prefer devices where the battery can be replaced by simply removing the back cover. Also, if the phone falls into water, it’s recommended to remove the battery and let it dry in rice for at least 24 hours (impossible on an iPhone).

Final comment: Not everything is measurable or comparable. Things like microphone quality, build quality, feel in the hand, operating system usability, terminal appearance, etc. So I always recommend watching a review/analysis of the device you’re interested in. There are many people dedicated to reviewing gadgets and writing articles like this one or uploading mini-documentaries about each of these toys to YouTube. You just need to search Google for "Model of the phone review" or "análisis" (in Spanish). Even if you’re torn between two similar terminals, you can search for a comparison.

I hope this article helps you make a better decision on your next purchase, so you’ll have a prosperous technological relationship and thus contribute to the ecological cause. Below is a photo of a mobile phone dump.