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highly rated
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newest
The people have spoken! But are they worth listening to?
Sortable considers not only how highly reviewed a product is, but also how many reviews it has received to boil down a single number that tells you your odds of getting a lemon.
The release date is the date the product was first available for purchase, which is often a while after the manufacturer officially announces a product.
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iPhone
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Android
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BlackBerry
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Windows Phone
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Bada
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brew MP
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webOS
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meego
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AT&T
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Verizon Wireless
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Sprint
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T-Mobile
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Alltel
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U.S. Cellular
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Cricket Wireless
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metroPCS
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Virgin Mobile
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Boost Mobile
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large
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high PPI
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touch
- Capacitive touchscreens
- detect small changes in electric current when touched with your bare hand. Note capacitive screens cannot detect a touch when the user is wearing gloves. If this poses a problem, you can use a special capacitive stylus.
- Resistive touchscreens
- consist of two thin surfaces that, when pressed together, indicate the location of a touch. Because they react to pressure rather than electric charge, resistive screens can be used while wearing gloves.
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high-res
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multitouch
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OLED
- TFT LCD (Thin Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Display)
- A type of LCD display often used in consumer electronics. Popular subtypes of TFT LCD are TN and IPS.
- TN (Twisted Nematic) LCD
- Relatively inexpensive and also the most common. However, the viewing angle on TN displays are very limited and colors shift when viewed from an angle.
- IPS (In-Plane Switching) LCD
- Designed to have better viewing angle and color reproduction than TN screens.
- OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode)
- OLEDs provide better viewing angles, improved contrast, better power efficiency and faster response times. However they are currently more expensive to produce, have a shorter lifetime than LCD and are susceptible to image burn in.
The diagonal size of a display is the distance between two opposite corners of the screen.
Note that two screens can have the same diagonal size but have different lengths and widths if the screens have different aspect ratios.
For example a 15" screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio will actaully measure 12" x 9", whereas a 15" screen with a 16:9 aspect ration will measure 13.1" x 7.4"
Screen PPI, or Pixels per Inch, is a measure of how sharp an image the screen will display. More PPI means that there are more pixels packed tightly together on the screen.
The formula used to calculate PPI from a screen's resoultion and size is:
Where H is the horizontal resolution, V is the vertical resolution, and D is the diagonal size of the screen
On very high PPI screens, text may be rendered smaller and be more difficuilt to read.
There are two mechanism used by the screen to determine when and where a user is touching it :
The native screen resolution. The native resolution will display the largest, clearest, least distorted image, at the higest refresh rate.
Multi-touch devices can detect at least two distinct points of contact on the touchscreen. This allows for advanced navigation functionaly like pinch-to-zoom, and custom scrolling and swiping.
Display technology affects viewing angle and color reproduction. Common types include:
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keyboard
- No keyboard - Uses the touchscreen for all text input.
- QWERTY keyboard - Small version of a standard QWERTY keyboard; at least 26 keys.
- Half-QWERTY keyboard - Letters are arranged in the QWERTY layout, but some letters share keys; fewer than 26 keys.
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numeric keypad
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thin
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waterproof
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light weight
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small
Types of smartphone keyboards:
A numeric keypad is the traditional 12-key dedicated keyboard used for dialing phone numbers. Most modern smartphones do not have this feature, and instead use the general-purpose touchscreen for dialing numbers.
Thinner smartphones will fit in your pocket or purse more easily. Expect phones with physical keyboards to be a bit thicker than those without. The thinnest smartphones are under 10mm thick.
Some phones are water resistant or waterproof, designed to operate in the rain or other wet conditions!
Newer phones with large screens and lots of built-in functionality tend to be heavier than older, simpler phones. Remember, you'll be carrying your phone around with you all the time, so its weight matters!
There is a great deal of variance in the size of smartphones, though even the largest ones fit into most pants pockets. The size of phone to get is largely one of personal taste.
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front camera
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camera flash
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secondary camera
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HD video
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HDMI out
A built in flash will help your avoid blurry photos when there isn't enough light.
Higher resolution movies look great when played back on a large HD television, but they typically take more disk space, and can be more difficult to edit and store.
A video-out connection lets you display photos or videos on a TV or projector. Some phones use standard video connectors such as mini HDMI or micro HDMI, others use proprietary connectors.
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headphone jack
- 3.5 mm (1/8"): The most common headphone jack. Supports the same headphones you use with your iPod or other MP3 player, or your computer or laptop.
- 2.5 mm (3/32"): Less common in general than 3.5", but still prevelent in mobile devices.
- Micro USB: Not common outside cell phones, but adapters to 3.5 mm are available.
- Mini USB: Same as Micro USB, but uses the older Mini USB jack format.
- Proprietary: Headphones must be bought specifically to work with proprietary headphone jacks.
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FM radio
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FM transmitter
A headphone jack allows you to plug in external headphones for listening to music privately.
There are different types of headphone jacks:
FM radio receiver for listening to your favourite radio stations on your phone.
An FM transmitter allows you to broadcast music from your phone on an FM frequency. This is most useful for listing to music on any car sound system that has a radio. The broadcast is very low power to avoid (by law) interfering with other radio stations or other nearby devices.
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high capacity
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long talk time
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long standby time
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removable
Battery capacity is measured in milliamp hours (mAh). A battery with capacity 1500 mAh can deliver a current of 1500 milliamps for one hour. Translating mAh to real-world performance of a battery is non-trivial, and depends on many factors (like the type of battery, and the efficiency of the device).
Very generally, larger mAh ratings are better, however, values are really only comparable within the same type of battery. For example, a 1500 mAh alkaline will not necessarilly power a device as long as a 1500 mAh NiMH battery -- especially in high-drain electronic devices.
Talk time is how long the phone's battery is expected to last while actually talking on the phone. The phone uses much more power when active and servicing calls than when it is sitting idle (standby time).
Standby time is how long the phone's battery is expected to last if it is just sitting idle (not servicing calls or data).
Like all rechargeable batteries, Smartphone batteries lose their ability to hold a charge after a certain number of recharges. When this happens, it's convenient to be able to purchase a replacement battery. However, some Smartphones do not have removable batteries. If you expect to recharge your battery a lot, look for a phone with a removable battery.
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wifi hotspot
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4G
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NFC
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fast wifi
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fast download
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low latency
A wifi hotspot gives your phone the ability to share its Internet connection with any other wifi enabled device, this is a great way to get on the Internet with your laptop even if there is no free wifi connection nearby.
In the cellphone industry successive improvements to networks are labeled based on their generation, most phones today support 3G, e.g. 3rd generation, and the newest phones today support fourth generation technology, or 4G.
NFC stands for near field communication, it enables wireless transactions between phones or other devices such as wireless payments, typically around 4cm or less in distance, read more at Wikipedia.
Most modern smartphones support wifi. This allows the phone to connect to the Internet using a wireless router that you may already have in your home or place of business. The advantage of connecting over wifi is that data usage does not count against your (often expensive) cellular data plan.
Free wifi hotspots in public places are incresingly prevelent, so wifi connectivity on your phone can be very handy.
Download speed is a measurement in Mbps that represents the fastest download rate we've seen for this phone at Geekaphone's Mobile Speed Test site.
Network latency data is collected at Geekaphone's Mobile Speed Test site. Geekaphone measures latency by making repeated HTTP requests from the smartphone and timing how long the response takes to arrive. Lower values are better. The value shown here is the lowest latency value we've seen for this phone.
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fast processor
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Dual core
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lots of ram
Clock speed is related to the number of operations a processor can complete in a second. For a particular processor, increasing the clock speed (known as overclocking) will increase the performance of the processor at the cost of using more electricity and generating more heat.
Care should be taken to not compare processors from different manufactures, or even different families, on clock speed alone since clock speed is only one of many factors that can influence the performance of the processor. Software performance benchmark measurements are a better way to compare performance.
Number of physical computing cores on the processor. Having additional cores allows you to run multiple processing-intensive applications at once.
More cores result in better parallelism, meaning more computations can be processed in parallel. Having more cores alone will not necessarily increase performance of a single application; application must be specifically written to take advantage of multiple cores. Many modern applications, such as video compression, can take advantage of multiple cores.
Total amount of internal memory (known as RAM) installed on the system.
More memory allows you to run more applications at once and can speed up your computer. Accessing RAM is much faster than accessing other types of storage, so having lots of RAM can speed up your applications by allowing the Operating System to keep more data in RAM, ready to access when needed.
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Apple
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Samsung
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Motorola
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HTC
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LG
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Nokia
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Sony
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RIM
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Huawei
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Acer
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ZTE
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T-Mobile
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amoi
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Dell
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Micromax
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Gigabyte
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accelerometer
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GPS
- Standalone GPS: Uses only radio signals from the GPS satellites to determine location. In poor signal conditions (i.e. in a city with tall buildings, or during bad weather), it can take a very long time (many minutes) to determine the user's initial position.
- (Assissted) A-GPS: Uses servers on the cellular network as well as satellites to determine initial position. This can greatly speed up finding a user's initial position, even in poor satellite signal scenarios.
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gyroscope
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compass
A sensor that is able to detect motion as well as the orientation of a device (for example, holding a device vertically as opposed to horizontally).
Phones with GPS receivers can pinpoint your current location and provide directions to wherever you want to go. There are two main types of GPS functionality found in modern phones:
A sensor that determines orientation and rotation. Devices with a gyroscope typically provide more accurate 3D motion tracking than those with just an accelerometer.
A sensor that determines direction facing relative to North, East, West and South. Consumer electronics typically implement a compass using a magnetometer, which measures magnetic fields.
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fast web browser
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Adobe Flash
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multitasking
The browser benchmark is a relative measure of browser performance. The value is a the average number of ms required by this phone to complete the bechnmark; lower values are better. The data is collected at Geekaphone's Mobile Speed Test site.
Many websites (i.e. youtube.com), videos, and games on the Internet require the Adobe Flash Player to run, so it is to your advantage if your device supports Flash. To learn more see Adobe's certified devices page.
A multi-tasking OS can run more than one app at the same time.
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lots of storage
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micro sd
- Micro SD, Micro SDHC Micro SD is even smaller than Mini SD. Micro SD supports cards up to 4gb in size, while Micro SDHC supports up to 32gb
- Mini SD, Mini SDHC Mini SD/SDHC cars are larger than their Micro counterparts, and are not as popular
- SD, SDHC These are larger again than the Micro and Mini versions, and are most often found in digital cameras rather than phones
The amount of internal storage installed installed in the system.
More storage allows you to keep more photos and videos on your computer, as well as have more applications installed at once.
Most devices have a slot for a memory card. Memory cards give your device more storage capacity say for photos and videos.
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Oct, 2011
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