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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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.
If anything, battery life is a bigger issue now because you can’t just swap batteries like you could 10 years ago. You could have a backup battery fully charged and ready to go, or if you were like me you could just buy a triple capacity aftermarket replacement battery and have an extra chonky phone.
All those options are gone now. When the battery dies, you either pay $80 for someone to replace it or (more commonly) trade it in for a new phone that’s marginally better.