For many of us, it’s fun to dig into the specs of the latest gadgets. Power impresses us, quality impresses us; everyone wants the best smartphone. But how can we measure what is best? All too often, it becomes a numbers game, and that makes it easy for device manufacturers to hoodwink consumers.
Take, for example, Nokia’s recent and much-balleyhooed “41 megapixel” camera in the new Pureview 808 smartphone. The camera itself actually looks impressive — too bad it’s stuck in a phone running Symbian! — but the 41 megapixel number is nothing more than a branding trick designed to make people feel like the 808′s camera is better than other cameras because it has more megapixels. In fact, the 808′s camera is better than lots of other smartphone cameras, but the megapixel number is misleading. In standard mode, the camera produces 5 megapixel photos; the other megapixels are used to enhance the quality of that smaller image. Moreover, the idea that a high megapixel count equals quality is ridiculous. Canon’s newest high-end professional camera, the 1DX, takes far nicer photos than the 808 or any other smartphone, and it has an 18 megapixel sensor.
Another example is the “core war” Chinese smartphone manufacturers are currently engaged in. Having apparently decided that two just isn’t enough cores, everyone is now working on quad-core smartphones and tablets. In a few years, my guess is we’ll be hearing about 6-core phones, and we’re already hearing about hyperthreaded phones (a way to increase the processor count virtually).
I have no interest in standing in the way of progress, but I think as far as a lot of these numbers are concerned, we’re already well beyond the “good enough” stage. The average consumer does not need a quad-core smartphone to make phone calls and play Angry Birds. Heck, even the average geek consumer doesn’t need a quad-core smartphone, or a 41 megapixel camera for that matter.
Manufacturers know this, and so do their marketing teams, but unfortunately numbers are one of the quickest and easiest ways to communicate “best”. User experience is a much better metric for consumers to use when selecting a phone (or whatever), but it’s also a much harder one to quantify. Moreover, when a company knows the user experience doesn’t stand up to the competition’s — looking at you, Symbian — puffing up some number is the best way to get attention. Look how well it works; here we all are talking about the Pureview 808. If Nokia had left the numbers out of it and just pushed how good the images look, do you think as many people would have noticed?
World consumer rights day is approaching, and in China that generally means lots of media exposes about shoddy products and lying companies. But I hope that consumers — myself included — can also pay a bit more attention to the misdirection companies aim at us as the market in China and elsewhere begins to get flooded with quad-core smartphones and (in all likelihood) high-megapixel camera sensors.
The highest number sometimes is the best, but most of the time, it’s a lot more complicated than that.