This post is just to fill the recent dearth of posts on this blog. So it’s about trivial stuff like comparing phones, none of which I own.
Reading the news about Nokia Lumia 1020, I landed up on this post titled “Nokia Lumia 1020 hardware 'lags behind'” and I laughed out loud even before noticing that it was on ‘AppleInsider’ or more aptly, reading the article. (Let’s ignore similar views / comments about software & apps as they are ‘beyond the scope’ of this post.)
After stopping myself from ROFL, I started reading the article. Mainly, its first section comprising of 7 paragraphs. And was disappointed to note that only the 2nd paragraph was relevant. It had a statement which again made me LOL: “… its "hardware features continue to lag behind some of the flagship devices like Samsung Galaxy S4," which is both lighter and thinner despite having a larger screen and faster processor.” (emphasis mine)
I guess you understand my issue with the word ‘continue’ but lets focus on the later part of the sentence. So, of all the possible hardware features that could be compared, they focus only on ‘light’ & ‘thin’. On top of that, they connect it to a ‘reason’ involving screen & processor with the word ‘despite’ as if the larger screen affects thickness or a faster processor affects lightness (or whatever the combination thereof they came up in their mind), conveniently forgetting that the slight differences (and yes, the differences are slight: 28g & 2.5mm) could be due to the massive camera sensor, lenses & OIS system packed in NL1020. Also, the larger screen is nothing to boast about as seen here:
So at the end of the day, the only real difference emerging from their ‘dumb analysis’ seems to be the dual-core 1.5GHz vs. Quad-core 1.9GHz, which is indeed something to boast about… Only technically, though! As long as the phones perform smoothly, this number doesn’t matter because one is not going to run MATLAB or Mathematica on them. And if IE10 & XBox games like Jetpack Joyride run smoothly on my NL620, NL1020 isn’t going to lag behind.
A much more interesting feature, they conveniently (again) forgot to mention, is that the NL1020 has a FM radio which SGS4 doesn’t. Now that is a real ‘lag’ in terms of hardware features! Anyway, since NL1020 is touting its camera (so much), how about comparing it on its own terms to something similar? Oh, but there’s not much (yet) to compare apart from this camera phone: ‘Galaxy S4 Zoom’. And you do quickly realize that it really ‘lags’ NL1020 in more than one way!
Enjoy forming your own opinions:
