Posts

Task Managers: Are they needed?

TLDR; no, they are definitely not needed. Task Managers are a antithesis to the way Android operates. Android has evolved over the years to accommodate user habits and because of that, apps work more seamlessly in the background. The point here comes to the underlying framework of Android; Linux. I'll try to keep it simple, without getting into too much technical lingo. Linux based operating systems are more optimized than Windows. Why bring Windows into the scene now, you ask? Well, you could say that the practice of shutting down apps and force closing apps began with Windows all along. Windows allows more user control over what apps run in the background and which can be terminated. Task Managers were and are still important in Windows. This "habit" may have transitioned over to Android in the long run. Coming back to Task Managers in Android, the Google Play Store has a wide collection of junk claiming to help your smartphone run faster. A very high majority of t

Smartphones and Networks in India

Normally people focus their smartphone use on media and entertainment. In India, network coverage is slowly developing, unlike US, UK, Japan, Korea etc. (the later two were the first to bring about 4G). So, without decent 3G speeds, (average speeds generally stay around the 5 mbps mark) the smartphone ecosystem becomes pretty useless. Downloading apps, using Facebook, Instagram and other data heavy apps lead to a retarded user experience. Not to mention the pathetic state of the Cloud in India thanks to the below average 3G speeds. Streaming music, video and using cloud storage services on a regular basis is also slow and expensive thanks to the absurd data pricing schemes.  Talking about pricing schemes, major service providers in India want retarded development, so as to profit from this for as long as they can. They do not realize that people would pay a reasonable amount to get good speeds and therefore a good user experience.  India can be a potential market for electron

The Ideal Smartphone

Image
I'll start with the display. The human eye cannot distinguish individual pixels above 300 Pixels per inch (PPI). A display with a density of anything above 300 PPI is pointless. Period. (The exception being, when Virtual Reality headsets like the Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard are used, but I'll get back to that later).   Do you really need a phone with 4GB of RAM, a quad HD display, and an octacore processor? Do high end specs make an ideal smartphone? Let's look into each aspect of a smartphone and redefine how it can be "Ideal".  Display  Based on the screen size PPI can be calculated from this site . A 5" screen with a 720p display gives a PPI of 293 and this is pretty sharp to the eye. Using a 720p display instead of 1080p means can not only save on processing power (phone runs faster), but you can get more battery life for the day. A super AMOLED or an IPS display can get the job done. That doesn't make much of a differ