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Smartphones keep getting faster. If you buy a new high-end phone this year, you’ll find it’s noticeably more powerful than last year’s best gadgets. It will let you run much more demanding apps, it will load up Web pages more quickly, and it will deliver sharper, more advanced videos and games.
This might not sound like a big deal—aren’t new gadgets always faster than old gadgets? Yes, that’s true. But what’s striking about phones is how quickly they’re getting quicker. This year’s top-of-the line phones are likely to be twice as fast as those released last year. And last year’s phones weren’t slouches—they were twice as powerful as the ones that came out in 2011. This pace is remarkable. Indeed, if you study the speed increases of smartphones over time, you notice a thrilling trend: Phones are getting faster really, really fast—much faster, in fact, than the increase in speed in the rest of our computers.
If you scrutinize this quickening pace, though, you’re bound to get disillusioned. One of the reasons phones have been getting faster is that they’re also getting bigger. A bigger phone allows for a bigger battery, which allows for a faster processor. But now we’ve hit a wall in phone size: Today’s biggest and fastest phones carry screens of around 5 inches, and they’re not going to get any bigger than that. (If they did, they wouldn’t fit in your hand, and would thus be phablets.)
This might not sound like a big deal—aren’t new gadgets always faster than old gadgets? Yes, that’s true. But what’s striking about phones is how quickly they’re getting quicker. This year’s top-of-the line phones are likely to be twice as fast as those released last year. And last year’s phones weren’t slouches—they were twice as powerful as the ones that came out in 2011. This pace is remarkable. Indeed, if you study the speed increases of smartphones over time, you notice a thrilling trend: Phones are getting faster really, really fast—much faster, in fact, than the increase in speed in the rest of our computers.
If you scrutinize this quickening pace, though, you’re bound to get disillusioned. One of the reasons phones have been getting faster is that they’re also getting bigger. A bigger phone allows for a bigger battery, which allows for a faster processor. But now we’ve hit a wall in phone size: Today’s biggest and fastest phones carry screens of around 5 inches, and they’re not going to get any bigger than that. (If they did, they wouldn’t fit in your hand, and would thus be phablets.)
The Great Smartphone Conundrum: Performance vs. Battery Life
Smartphones keep getting faster. If you buy a new high-end phone this year, you’ll find it’s noticeably more powerful than last year’s best gadgets. It...
slate.com
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