Monday, May 2, 2011

Know the features and Choose Right Mobile Phone for You

I had shared in my previous post that I will come up with topic on selecting mobile phones.I am first brieafing the list of features in this post.
Evolution of mobile phone has surpassed the statement "Necessity is the mother of all invention". Cell phone makers are believing that whatever is produced will get sold. This is what making our life troublesome and We tend to pay for what we don’t want or don’t intend to use. Market is inundated with dozens of brands together making thousands of phones with variety of features and most importantly disparity of pricing.
Smart buyers avoid this by simply listing down the features they are looking for and they might need in near future. However to do that one need to be aware of what are the features available and are in the offing. I am attempting in this post to brief about the technology and features which are here now. Firstly I categorized the features based on what popular websites displays and then detail each of it. Though the features are interrelated I would keep it simple for the readers.
  1. Telephony and Messaging:Telephony is the basic, what cellphone are meant for. Very commonly people list telephony as CDMA and GSM, earlier CDMA was advantageous as it supported high speed data transfer, but in GSM arena after HSDPA over EDGE the data transfer speed has increased tremendously, and also in GSM you can swap the SIM card between phone, where as in CDMA one need to get configuration done by the operator. However there is much less threat of SIM cloning.
  2. If you are in international traveller CDMA will not offer international roaming, moreover the presence of CDMA is limited to USA and some part of ASIA and Europe, GSM is everywhere.
    With 3G technology the voice telephony will not get affected much, but with better bandwidth and high speed the voice CHAT and live streaming of video and TV channels, currently in India the 3G service are little expensive and coverage is also not very good. There are roughly 30-40 TV channels on Live streaming. There is no unlimited plans for 3G as of now and the limited one starts from 500 onwards.
    Please keep in mind that where ever the 3G signal are not available, the device will automatically switch to 2G services.
    Messages can be maintained on phone and memory, it can have threaded view and lot improved text input methods, like Swype and voice etc. as you go high. More on MMS, push email etc.
  3. Screen Type, Size and Resolution: Screen resolutions is nothing but number of pixel per inch, so with increased resolution the clarity increased. If one is looking for video and live TV etc. go for high screen resolution something above 240x320. Another factor of screen is type the TFT & LED the advantage of LED is you can view the screen clearly even under the sunlight. Related to touch screen the capacitive touch is much smoother than resistive touch. Other main touch features are
    1. Accelerometer sensor which helps in auto rotate pictures
    2. Multi-touch which helps in pinch zoom and rotation
    3. Proximity sensor for auto turn off
  4. User Interface: User interface very important specially for smart phones, do get a feel of UI and find you like it. Do check the review of usability of the phone you are contemplating on you tube videos.
  5. Battery capacity: very Important, these days with high end processing capabilities of phones consumes lots of power. Ensure that your phone is rigged up with sufficient battery capacity. Mostly in reviews manufactures mention the talk time and stand by battery life only but that’s not sufficient, you should ensure battery life at optimum usage. Android phones has this drawback of consuming lot of juice. Even 1200 mAh is not sufficient on Andro sets it will require you to charge twice daily. Also check for life of battery.
  6. Camera: What you want from your camera, still, recording, flash, resolution etc. a 2MP camera with good lens and auto focus is sufficient for normal use. For recording 30 frames per second (FPS) is normal. Less expensive ones comes with 15 FPS usually. If you want to use camera more extensively there are phones which comes with very high resolutions and much more advance features.
  7. One Need a front camera also called secondary camera for video calls.
  8. Audio/Video and gallery: the quality of sound and video varies a lot, the maker will have usability in mind, if you are using phone for entertainment, check for the audio quality. There are players which plays all formats of audio and videos and some are very limited. Look for the apps in the phone you are looking for. Also the gallery can be organized and synced from your online data, the more high end phone automatically organize the content. Check your needs.
  9. Connectivity: Bluetooth, IR, Edge, dual band, 3G, HSDPA, Wifi: IR is obsolete, Bluetooth 2.0 is sufficient for occasional data transfer, however, if relying of Bluetooth on regular synchronization, then ver 3.0 is required. Using Wifi you can access faster internet on your device using broadband services. If your phone is capable of reasonable browsing capacity do look for wifi. Even if you don’t have wifi, you can access internet using Edge, GPRS or HSDPA or 3G connections. Earlier stated 3 is expensive as of now, but if you look few months down the line it may not be as per the past trend. Using HSDPA which will work with 3G bandwidth only u can view live TV, video chat and surf at much faster speed. Usually the HSDPA these days on phone claims to give 3.6 -7.2 MBPS of speed. Ensure your need.
  10. Processor, RAM, Storage: if you are going to replace your Laptop with handheld device and later sync, if you want to play high end games and multiple programs together then a high processing capacity and higher RAM is needed. If an android phone having 600MHZ processor this will be just sufficient from starting and switching between applications. And if not used optimally this will hang as well. Normally these days most of the phones comes with the extended capacity upto32GB, but try putting one even 16 GB card and access the data on it. It becomes very slow. Only phone with high speed processer can smoothly support 32 GB memory.
  11. Browser: Opera mini is supposed to be fastest browser, so if you are using GPRS which gives data speed usually upto 32-48 kbps, it’s advisable to use opera. Also check the if the flash player is supported or not. For android phone of 2.2 foryo and above support the flash but one might have to purchase from the market.
  12. GPS, MAPS and Navigation: If you travel a lot, this is very handy, even if you in unknown territory, you can find your way using GPS navigation and digital compass. On some phone there are limited GPS subscription and some are lifetime, do check on yours if buying one with GPS build in.
  13. Operating System: Look for operating system of the phone, special focus with intent of how the applications are available on that platform, how it is prices and accessibility. Symbian, BADA, android etc. are common for Indian market.
  14. Applications: how the phone is loaded with applications such as games, SNS integration, search, Youtube, document viewer/editor, photo/viewer/editor, calendar, voice command, audio/video players, antivirus etc. etc. the list is very long, list down your usage and check for them. It should either be loaded or easily downloadable.
  15. Organizer and Documents: if you are checking mails whether you can download upload any application or not, viewing and editing of documents like word, excel, notes etc. are possible or not.
  16. Aesthetic: this is very personal, you must like the shape, size, texture, finish and handling of the phone you are buying.
  17. Value for Money: when a salesperson will pitch in they will try to sell a phone which is fully loaded as you will have all you ask for, but that comes very expensive. It is standard practice that,  you should list down the feature mandatory for you and feature that are good to have and  you might pay additional dollar to have that in your phone. Keeping this list search for phones available and then from the available list go by the combination of asthetics and pricing.
One very good site for checking the phone review is gsmarena and for online purchase of mobiles with reasonable discount in India is flipcart.


I hope this post will help you choosing the right phone for you.

3 comments:

  1. Awesome Post & I Completely agree that Andro sets requires more charge :( ... Lots of Stunning applications but We can't use b'coz charge will be down. One Thing I've also noticed that sometimes Andro turns itself off automatically...

    ReplyDelete
  2. oh is it the OS problem, i was wondering why sometime in the middle of angry bird the phone gets switch off all by itself.

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  3. FYI

    http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=1b805609553224d0&hl=en

    &

    http://androidforums.com/evo-4g-support-troubleshooting/111899-phone-turns-off-itself.html

    ReplyDelete