I like to read reviews of mobile phones and tablets. They're particularly important if I'm thinking of buying a gadget. This happens pretty rarely though. But even when I'm not planning to make a purchase, gadget reviews are still really helpful.
This is because they give a glimpse into the current state of devices. Reading gadget reviews lets you know just what kind of specifications you can get nowadays, at a certain price. I remember looking at the details of the original Cherry Mobile Flare when it first came out in 2012.
At that time, it offered what I thought were amazing specs at such an affordable price point. It was so much better specs-wise, than what the other brands were offering. I thought that the Flare was going to change people's expectations about what they should get for their hard-earned money. To a certain extent, it helped pave the way for the budget Android phones being sold by various manufacturers today.
So taking a look at gadget reviews on a fairly regular basis, helps to show how devices are becoming not just better or more powerful, but also more affordable. That said, there are still some things that I wish I could see more often, when reading gadget reviews. One important piece of information, that I wish reviewers would post more often, is information on usable storage.
The problem is that many device manufacturers and providers today like to advertise how much built-in storage their phones and tablets have. But then, after you buy the phone or tablet, and you try to install apps and especially games in it, you very quickly find to your dismay that you can only use a small fraction of the storage to install apps.
This is a problem I ran into with the Cherry Mobile Superion Vector. I liked the idea of it having 16 GB of built-in storage. Now, I already expect that when the ad says 16 GB of storage, there isn't actually a full 16 GB free. Usually, some of that storage is used for software that is already on the phone, so you end up with fewer GBs free. However, I was thinking that I should at least have several GB of storage that I can use to install apps. But then I learned that the storage that could be used for apps was just much too small!
And that's really a big issue as far as I am concerned. I totally did not expect that the Cherry Mobile Superion Vector would only have around 1 GB available to install apps. That is such a tiny fraction of the 16 GB that the ad said was the total storage.
I found out about the 1 GB of app storage thanks to people on Facebook who posted screenshots of benchmarks that they ran on their Vectors, as well as an online review. If those people had not taken the time to upload those images, I would have probably already bought the Vector and been disappointed when it arrived.
1 GB for app installation is just too small. Cherry Mobile should realize this. There are certain games which will not even install properly, given that storage limitation. In my case, I hardly play games on my devices. But I do install a lot of apps for navigation, reading, video, music and so on. I find that I usually install at least 1.5 GB worth of apps in my phone. So the Vector would not even have been able to handle that.
Now, there are some ways to try to get around this. You can try to move part of the app onto an SD card. However, this will only move some of the app and not all of it, and not all apps allow this. So the 1 GB will still fill up over time. You can use an app such as Link2SD. But again, these are band aid solutions to a problem which should have never been an issue in the first place. At the very least, Cherry Mobile should have set aside around 5 GB for app storage in the Vector.
This is why gadget reviews are so important. I just wish that more gadget reviewers would install benchmarking software on the phones and tablets that they review, and post the screenshots. There is so much detailed and useful information contained in these screenshots. The apps are free, so all it takes is some additional time and effort from the reviewer. This information could make all the difference in a potential buying situation.
Here is an example. I ran the benchmarking apps Quadrant and AnTuTu on my Cherry Mobile Titan TV mobile phone. These apps are free and can be downloaded from the Google Play Store. Running AnTuTu gave me this information:
This screenshot would be useful to me as a potential buyer because it shows:
~ the version of Android the phone uses (4.1.2)
~ the amount of RAM the phone contains (about 1 GB)
~ the amount of storage that I can use for installing apps (around 2.5 GB -- The Titan TV originally only had around 500 MB for installing apps, which was nowhere near enough. Thankfully, there were people on Facebook who provided guidance on increasing that to 2.5 GB.)
Here is another screenshot, this time from Quadrant:
This screenshot is useful to me because it shows the resolution of the Titan TV's screen (around 480x800).
These types of screenshots from benchmarking apps like AnTuTu and Quadrant could be very useful for potential buyers. This is because there can be a lot of confusion about the real specs of certain phones and tablets.Is the phone running Jelly Bean, KitKat or something else? Does the device really have 1 GB of RAM (Right now, this is the minimum amount where I'm okay with the performance.).
How much storage is ACTUALLY available for installing apps? Not photos, video, documents or files, but APPS? Is the screen really an HD screen, or is it less than that?
I do hope that more reviewers of mobile phones and tablets will post screenshots from AnTuTu and Quadrant. These would really be very helpful and appreciated.
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