The smartphone industry has a specifications problem and the tech press must share a large part of the blame. We are living in a world that’s obsessed with octa-core processors, 13-megapixel cameras, and gigabytes of RAM, but we don’t spend enough time talking about the thing that really matters - how it feels to use a phone on an everyday basis.
In a bizzaro alternate reality where theiPhone 6 launch happened in India and Apple hosted a Q& A at the event, we bet the first question Tim Cook would have been asked is how the company expects to sell a flagship phone that’s just dual core with only 1GB of RAM. Thankfully, most sensible people don’t judge the iPhone based only on its specifications - Apple has never even officially acknowledged half of them, unlike most other manufacturers who alternate between talking about the price to specs ratio and the experience depending upon which device they are talking about and whether they are the segment leader at that point or playing catch-up.
However, when it comes to entry-level smartphones, people rarely look beyond specifications. There seems to be an expectation that the customer in this segment is someone who doesn’t care about things like stability and user experience, worrying only about how good the phone’s spec sheet looks.
That’s not to say that specifications of a device don’t matter at all and can be completely disregarded. For the longest time entry-level smartphones came with sub-par hardware, so now that you can get a sub-Rs. 10, 000($170) phone with specifications that were found on flagship level smartphones not too long ago, it’s natural that people are excited.
This excitement, though, often tends to slip into the territory of unhealthy obsessions, where many have been happy to disregard the unpredictability of the latest Mi, Yu, and other self-proclaimed flagship killer only because they pack premium specs - the actual everyday experience of the end user be damned. At the same time, smartphones that trade specifications for a stable, if unglamorous, user experience find few takers even within the tech press. The flat response to last year’sAndroid One smartphones is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon.