But the important question is that what has made these changes, and the answer is that the increasing battery life, better dual and triple camera setups, blazing fast performance and improved gaming experience has been achieved with the help of latest processors. These days, we find that smartphones are either camera centric, battery centric or performance focused. In this post, we will cover these three important aspects.
Processor
Processor is also called system on chip (SoC). Soc contains all the primary components like CPU, GPU etc. A processor is basically the part that controls all the major actions taken by the device. It commands the different components to do a specific task.Following is the list of things which make a processor better:
Clock speed
Also called clock rate, it is the speed at which a processor executes instructions. So, we can say that higher the clock rate, the more instruction per unit of time will be executed hence more tasks will be done and thus the CPU will be faster.
Chips Composition (number of cores)
The number of cores is also important, what it does is that it assigns any task to different cores depending on the size. You can say that number of cores makes multitasking easier.
Architecture
The CPU is designed on the nm scale, which basically says about the size of the CPU, the greater the size, the higher the heat dissipation. So, we can say that the smaller the size, the better the CPU.
Battery
The smartphone battery is based on lithium ion or lithium polymer. As the processing power of the phone increases, the power it requires also increases. So, we have to make sure that the battery is big enough to power the device. Usually, the battery ranges from 2500mAh to 4000mAh and some devices also come with a 5,000mAh battery. Needless to say, the bigger the battery, the smartphone can perform more heavy tasks for a longer period of time as these processes drain more battery. Also, we have to take some security measures to ensure safety as well, like packing in a metal case, leaving some space(cavity) around the battery to avoid accidents.
Camera
In the age of social media, the smartphone camera has become one of the most important features. Everyone wants the best camera setup in their smartphones and the craze for the camera never seems to stop. From 5 MP to 24 MP, from digital zoom to optical zoom, from EIS to OIS, smartphones have it all. Following is the list of some features of the smartphone camera.
Zoom
Zooming is the process of taking a closer look at the object which is far away, but while doing so, it also reduces the resolution and hence degrades the quality of the image but this can be avoided to a certain extent by using proper technology.Camera zooming is of two types:
1. Digital Zoom
Digital zoom is a technology where the camera shoots the photo and then crops and magnifies it to create an artificial close-up photo. This process requires magnifying or removing individual pixels, which can cause image quality degradation. You can simply understand this when you crop a pic in your phone to enlarge the pic, and you can see that the image quality become bad.
2. Optical Zoom
In Optical zoom, instead to taking the pic first and then cropping and magnifying, what it does is brings the whole pic closer to the lens and no cropping and magnifying is required here hence there is no loss in resolution. This is why Optical zooms is also called True Zoom.
Aperture
It’s basically an opening through which light falls on the lens. So, higher the size of the opening, the more light falls on the lens which helps in capturing clearer low light images.
Image Stabilization
The image stabilization is to reduce the camera vibration or shaking of hands to take clear pictures. It is very helpful while making a video when you have very shaky hands. It is of two types:
1. Electronic image stabilization (EIS)
It is achieved through the software and implemented by the processor with the help of gyroscope sensor. The gyroscope detects the movement and sends the data to the processor and it stabilizes the image, i.e, if the camera shakes to the left the processor will shift the image that much to the right and vice versa. It uses the same technique for vertical and horizontal movement.
2. Optical image stabilization (OIS)
it is a hardware based stabilization and under this, the optics itself moves along with the object movement to cancel out the shake of the camera, i.e, if the object moves to the left the camera optics will move that much to the right and vice versa, which gives final results that are better than EIS, but adding a hardware to the camera body is expensive that’s why only high end phones have this feature.
Megapixel
It is basically the pixel density per inch(resolution) of the camera. This feature is helpful while cropping the picture later, if needed. So, higher the megapixel of the camera you use to capture the image, you will get better results as it will have dense pixels, resulting in very clear images. While the megapixel alone cannot guarantee the image quality, it certainly helps a lot.To sum it up, we can say that the better smartphones would be which has the balanced combinations of all three aspects.
