If you're thinking of getting a phone, how do you compare performance?

mikeymikec · Jan 4, 2025

I suspect my work + running phone is dying (Moto G5, Google Voice started kicking in randomly while headphones are plugged in, today the volume kept going up and down when I'm wasn't even touching the phone, problems survived a reboot though they inexplicably calmed down as well).

I hate flying blind performance-wise when choosing a phone: I chose the Nokia 8.3 partly because my wife had a Nokia 7 Plus at the time which performed well so I largely assumed that given the 8.3's pricing compared to the 7 Plus that it looked like its successor, and my theory paid off.

Background:
My personal phone is doing fine (Nokia 8.3, no more security updates but my phone only really gets used when I'm not at my desktop computer so its usage is the exception rather than the general rule). Performance is good, I'd say it's only real disadvantage is that it's an absolute surfboard of a phone (6.81" diagonal screen size). A minor annoyance is that while it has a MicroSD slot, one has to use the FAT32 file system so no >4GB files; it would have been nice to store my encrypted desktop backups on it too. The G5 can handle exFAT.

I want my phone to be nice and responsive in the event that for example I have to web browse. The G5 was on the slow side, the Nokia is fine. The smaller the screen the better though I want at least 1080p resolution.

lxskllr · Jan 4, 2025

I don't. I compare features. I want a phone that has features I want, and beats the performance of my old phone by any margin. Like today. I have zero complaints about the performance of my stylus 5g, but if I were to get a new phone, I'd want it to perform better, just cause. That's how it's supposed to work. However, features matter more. If I can't get that performance boost while maintaining the features I want, I'll take the phone with identical performance to my old one.

spdfreak · Jan 4, 2025

Any modern phone will perform well. If you need a SD card slot or headphone jack, you are pretty limited. I'm still happy with my Pixel 6. I like pure android and constant updates direct from google. When I do get a new phone, it will be another Pixel- 7 yrs of updates and support makes it the most future proof phone out.

mikeymikec · Jan 4, 2025

spdfreak said:
Any modern phone will perform well.

Are you saying that any new budget phone (let's say ~£150 UKP) vs my Nokia 8.3 (which was ~£300 UKP in 2020) will web browse at least as quickly as that phone?

lxskllr · Jan 4, 2025

I have motog power(2024) I use as my internet phone. Since it's an internet phone, I don't have daily experience doing typical tasks, but it outperforms my stylus 5g(2021) which I already find acceptable. Maybe I'm not discerning enough. I don't game at all aside from very simple time wasters. Browse the web, open very large pdfs, and navigation are my primary uses.

manly · Jan 4, 2025

mikeymikec said:
Are you saying that any new budget phone (let's say ~£150 UKP) vs my Nokia 8.3 (which was ~£300 UKP in 2020) will web browse at least as quickly as that phone?

I think that's a bit of a stretch but what he's saying is we've gotten to the point in computing tech that hardware performance is often not the limiting factor anymore.

You saw this years ago when people would claim they're never upgrading their 2011 Sandy Bridge PC until an excellent replacement comes along (ultimately, that replacement was AMD Ryzen 🤣 ).

Not all mobile SoCs are the same, but the "latest and greatest" flagships are often overkill for 95% of all users. A mid-ranger like Pixel 8a is just as good as any 2023 flagship (actually it uses the same Tensor G3 as Pixel 8 Pro). It gets a little murkier when you drop into "budget" phones. In that case, you can look for reviews and GeekBench stats. At the least, you should be able to rule out anything undesirable.

My last two phone purchases have been Samsung Galaxy flagships, but it's possible I could drop down to a mid-ranger for my next purchase. Personally I wouldn't consider anything with less than 5 years of software support, which does rule out a lot of budget units.

mikeymikec · Jan 4, 2025

manly said:
I think that's a bit of a stretch but what he's saying is we've gotten to the point in computing tech that hardware performance is often not the limiting factor anymore.

You saw this years ago when people would claim they're never upgrading their 2011 Sandy Bridge PC until an excellent replacement comes along (ultimately, that replacement was AMD Ryzen 🤣 ).

No doubt, however junk x86 CPUs are/have been made that are put to shame by >10 year old x86 CPUs because manufacturers want people coming back for a replacement sooner, and I would be very surprised if similar scams didn't take place in the mobile phone market too.

manly said:
Not all mobile SoCs are the same, but the "latest and greatest" flagships are often overkill for 95% of all users.

I'm just looking for a good deal. gsmarena is good for finding phones with the features I want (e.g. MicroSD and a headphone jack), it's the processor performance aspect that I'm concerned about. WiFi calling is another pain in the neck I'll have to double-check because gsmarena doesn't list it for whatever reason, but I think I'll probably contact the manufacturer(s) to confirm support when I've make a shortlist of phones.

nOOky · Jan 5, 2025

I buy whatever Android phone has the best camera at the time. Unfortunately, that means sometimes sacrificing other features, but they are small ones. For instance, my S24 Ultra has a great camera, but the fingerprint sensor sucks, as does the cost of buying increased storage. I bought a USB-C SSD for quick transfer of files from the phone. The phone is also too large, I'd rather have those cameras in a smaller size.

Speed of the processor or amount of memory means very little if I'm looking at the best phones of each brand for my useage.

manly · Jan 5, 2025

mikeymikec said:
No doubt, however junk x86 CPUs are/have been made that are put to shame by >10 year old x86 CPUs because manufacturers want people coming back for a replacement sooner, and I would be very surprised if similar scams didn't take place in the mobile phone market too.

I'm just looking for a good deal. gsmarena is good for finding phones with the features I want (e.g. MicroSD and a headphone jack), it's the processor performance aspect that I'm concerned about. WiFi calling is another pain in the neck I'll have to double-check because gsmarena doesn't list it for whatever reason, but I think I'll probably contact the manufacturer(s) to confirm support when I've make a shortlist of phones.

Like I said, that's what GeekBench is for. You can find out which SoCs are duds, by 2024 standards. There are only so many mobile SoCs in the world, and people like benchmarking them.
Good reviews help somewhat too, but they are subjective and generally focus on the most well-known models.

Obviously some stuff is subjective, and because Android is customized by each manufacturer, there can be some performance variance. Like in the distant past, Samsung's TouchWiz had a bad rap.

If you don't want to do think about it, @spdfreak has the right idea but I'm really hesitant to give Google any more money these days. We'll see what happens when it's time to replace my Galaxy S21+ in about a year. (I wish I could use it even longer, but I'm loathe to use an unsupported computing device.)

Steltek · Jan 5, 2025

I hope you've backed up your data from your phone recently. When the G7 my mother had went, it just died all at once. Luckily, we had a Google backup (though, getting in to it was an experience as she couldn't remember her account password). She got a warranty replacement from Lenovo, which lasted until November 2023. It went completely, stone cold dead literally like an hour after I migrated her stuff from the G7 over to a new S23.

Honestly, she far preferred the G7 to the S23. The only thing we didn't like about either G7 she had was that for some reason it was impossible to get a screen protector that would stay on them. Something about the screens would always cause the glass protectors to lift around the edges. If it had not been for that, I would just have replaced it with the MotoG Power for the bigger battery (plus, it still has a headphone jack and still takes microSD cards).

mikeymikec · Jan 5, 2025

manly said:
Like I said, that's what GeekBench is for.

Odd - I was sure I had tried out Geekbench before in this respect but came up short. When I tried it for my Nokia and the Moto G55 5G I'm interested in, it came up with results. Admittedly I also tried my old phone on it and came up with nothing, maybe that was the "coming up short" I encountered before.

Anyway, thanks for the recommendation. The G55 is a smaller phone than my Nokia which is nice and it's also somewhat cheaper.

@Steltek - I've been backing up the contacts list regularly as I thought that was the only thing I'd really miss, but I've reached a point with it whereby the texts/call logs might be useful too so I installed my usual app for that and backed it up this evening. Reminders about getting backups done are a good idea in almost any case

spdfreak · Jan 5, 2025

A couple extra hundred dollars is a wise investment for a device you are going to keep and use for 5 yrs. I won't usually buy the top of the line, but I also won't skimp and end up with something that doesn't give me the experience I want. So, I'll spend a little extra to get a Pixel over a Moto just because the cameras are so much better.
You might want to wait a couple months til the Pixel 9a comes out. It will probably be the best mid-range phone by a large margin.

mikeymikec · Jan 6, 2025

spdfreak said:
A couple extra hundred dollars is a wise investment for a device you are going to keep and use for 5 yrs. I won't usually buy the top of the line, but I also won't skimp and end up with something that doesn't give me the experience I want. So, I'll spend a little extra to get a Pixel over a Moto just because the cameras are so much better.
You might want to wait a couple months til the Pixel 9a comes out. It will probably be the best mid-range phone by a large margin.

Admittedly one of the advantages of my Nokia is the camera and is a significant step up from my Moto G5 which took OK photos but was extremely fussy about how still the camera had to be. I've taken some really nice (IMO) photos on my Nokia.

As a work phone technically the camera aspect isn't important but I guess I'm treating this as a trial run for eventually replacing my Nokia. For an eventual personal phone replacement, am I really willing to trade some camera quality for a physically smaller phone, is one question I'm asking myself.

As for the Pixel range, I would be really surprised if I traded a MicroSD card slot and headphone jack, let alone the asking price.

Fanatical Meat · Jan 6, 2025

I’m the opposite, I want less performance and MORE battery life.
I haven’t needed more performance from a phone for at minimum 12 years.
Faster internet I needed until about 6 years ago.
Now I want longer battery life, this includes longer life before replacement and lower cost.

mikeymikec · Jan 6, 2025

Fanatical Meat said:
I’m the opposite, I want less performance and MORE battery life.
I haven’t needed more performance from a phone for at minimum 12 years.
Faster internet I needed until about 6 years ago.
Now I want longer battery life, this includes longer life before replacement and lower cost.

Wow. My first smartphone (2012, HTC Desire C) took 30-45 seconds to load + first web page (day one). Nexus 5 somewhere along the way was a bit quicker, I can't remember how quick. The Moto G5 was more like 10 seconds. My Nokia was the first phone I owned that loads a browser + first page fast enough for me, so my logic is that newer phones need to be at least as fast as that, and maybe a bit faster still because even loading the modern Messages app on my Moto G5 is not quick any more, so obviously the software has bloated a bit since 2018.

I'm not the kind of person who complains about a browser taking a second or three to load btw.

Every smartphone I've owned (for personal use) I get at the very least 3 days of battery life out of, 6 at best, so battery life doesn't concern me greatly.

manly · Jan 6, 2025

LOL WTF. Imagine going back to a 2013 smartphone. That's way more extreme than the "Sandy Bridge 4lyfe" reference I made earlier.

People nowadays are "addicted" to screens. I'm sure there are some long battery life devices out there, but your "screen ON" time must be minuscule to get 3 days of battery life from Every smartphone you've ever owned.

Not to sound like a Google commercial, but the Pixel 8a was $400 for Black Friday. Amortized over 5 years (actual support is 7 years, but you'll probably want a fresh battery at mid-life), that's not an expensive purchase. Samsung has some decent options around $300 if you want microSD. @spdfreak and I feel like paying more for good support is well worth the money.

If you're thinking of getting a phone, how do you compare performance?

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