Published on September 3rd, 2012 | by Sachit Shivam

Why phones shouldn’t have 4G radios, HD screens, quad core processors

Starting right away with this one.

Just my take on why we don’t need or shouldn’t have 4G radios, HD screens, and quad core processors in phones.

Apple didn’t make the iPhone 4S an LTE device because they know that battery life would take a big hit.
Already we have people complaining about the battery life, which went down in the 4S due to the second antenna (which was added, once again, to fix something that wasn’t broken, just to satisfy customers thinking they lost bars because of holding the phone on the left side)
Combined with 4G, the battery life would’ve barely crossed a few hours.

Think about all the LTE devices in the US right now.
Horrible battery life.
That’s the reason for the existence of the RAZR Maxx in the first place, and I’m not complaining about the phone.
What I am complaining about is the addition of things we don’t really need yet.
4G, HD screens, quad core processors.
We don’t need these things for now.
They’re unnecessary.
They hit battery life because they consume more CPU cycles in the case of HD screens rendering graphics, more battery life for 4G, and just generally higher power consumption in quad core processors even though manufacturers are working on power efficiency.

As for why we don’t need these things, in my opinion?

1. 4G
According to Wikipedia, peak download speeds on LTE are 100Mbits/s.
For the major effect this has on battery life, do we really need 4G?
What do we do on our phones that requires internet access speeds this high?
Think about it, is the trade-off really worth it?
3G’s fast enough at 7.2 Mbps peak speed.

2. HD screens
The Galaxy S II has a 480 by 800 4.3 inch screen with no noticeable pixelation.

Small icons and text on it look very good.

Enter a slew of phones, the Note, Note II, S III, Ativ S, Atrix HD, Galaxy Nexus, Xperia S, Xperia T, Xperia TX, Xperia acro S, Xperia SL, Xperia V, Xperia ion, One X, One XL, Optimus 4X HD, Lumia 920, Lumia 820 and so on.

Except for the Note and Note II, that have 5.3 and 5.5 inch displays respectively, none of their screens are large enough to justify a 720p display.
Wouldn’t a 480 by 800 or a 960 by 540 display have sufficed?

I think it would have, but maybe that’s just me.

3. Quad core processors

I’m not going to downplay how monumental an achievement having quad core processors that are that small, is.

However, there is no significant performance difference in dual core and quad core processors, before you gamers chuck stones at me, in day-to-day usage.

Phones running on either kind of processor perform just as well at most tasks.

Sure, maybe quad core processor running phones give you better graphics in games, but they also drain battery life.

Now that the list is done with, why does this matter?
It matters because your mobile phone isn’t truly mobile if you have to keep charging it every few hours.

Consumers who switch from featurephones to smartphones, their first complaint is the comparatively lower battery life.

Their complaints are justified.

Battery life is important.

I can’t have my phone dying on me on a long day away from a charging outlet.

Especially now with manufacturers making batteries non-user replaceable to make phones thinner.

And the OEMs aren’t going to put bigger batteries in phones either, to, once again, keep the phones slim.

Another major issue is that manufacturers then proceed to charge large amounts of money for the addition of these ‘features’ to their phones.

Of course, this only idealistic.
We all know OEMs aren’t going to not incorporate features, because they’re corporations and their aim is to make money however they can, regardless of which corporation we’re talking about.

So, there it is folks.

What do you think? Am I wrong?

Please do share your thoughts with me.

— Sachit Shivam

Tags: 4G, battery, core, games, HD, life, phones, processor, quad, radio, screen