Sony, HTC and Samsung are enjoying a good start to 2013 as all three companies have some really slick looking, fast phones in their portfolios. Hardware, at least in Android mobile devices has reached a point where going any faster is probably not going to matter unless we have apps that can harness all that power. Take the just released international variant of the Samsung Galaxy S 4 (SGS4), for example. It features dual quad core processors namely the A15s and the A7s. You can throw everything and the kitchen sink at it and you won't be able to slow that phone down. Which brings me to the question, are app developers losing the race when it comes to developing quality apps which can harness the power on tap. Clearly, for 95% of the people who are going to be using the SGS4, most of that power is going to be overkill.
There is also the issue of random hangups that plagues Android even on the fastest hardware. I'm going to try and reproduce that on the SGS4 I have again but the phone just seems to stall sometimes on apps like Twitter. I can't think of a reason why that should happen. This, on a phone with dual quads (I'm no fan of the "octa" branding) and 2 GB of RAM. You never see that on an iPhone. Interestingly, from what I've seen and read, the HTC One seems to be smooth and hiccup free. Interesting to note, that features a Qualcomm designed Snapdragon 600 processor clocked at 1.7 GHz coupled with slower DDR2 RAM. Also, I haven't read anything to suggest that the US variant of the SGS4 has said problems. Again, that also employs the same processor as the One but clocked at 1.9 GHz with faster DDR3L RAM. Maybe, then, this is a Cortex A15 issue or maybe I just have a bad unit. Whatever, the case may be, I hope this is fixed in the next iterative Samsung software update. I'll be comparing the international version of the SGS4 (i9500) and the HTC One in my next post very shortly.
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| Samung's Galaxy S4 |
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| HTC's One |
