Common Smartphone Features Explained

Megapixel

To begin with, the term Pixel is short for Picture Element. These are the small dots that are put together to form an image. Grab your phone or laptop, go into your gallery and open any image you have. Zoom into the picture as much as you can. You will see countless squared dots making the picture look blurry once highly zoomed-in. Those dots are pixels.

A Megapixel is one million pixels. So, for example, if a phone comes with a 16 Megapixel camera, it can capture an image that will produce 16 million pixels. That means that when you take a picture, even when you perform a regular zoom on it, you will not be easily able to see those pixel dots because they are just too many. To put it in another way, this would be like trying to locate one tiny drop of water amongst 16,000,000 drops of water in a bucket.

Gorilla Glass

That is a product developed by a manufacturing company named Corning. A Gorilla Glass is scratch-resistant and impact-resistant glass. This type of glass is commonly used on many smartphones because of the mass amount of usage that could lead to scratches and cracks. However, if your phone comes with gorilla glass, you do not necessarily need to spend money on a screen guard.

Accelerometer

Ever wondered how your smartphone knows when you have tilted your phone, and then it automatically adjusts the screen either horizontally or vertically? That is the work of the Accelerometer. Its main purpose is to adapt to the orientation change when the position is changed from vertical to horizontal and vice-versa. That makes it easier for the user to use the phone horizontally or vertically, depending on his preference. You can disable this feature by disabling the “Auto Rotate” setting if you do not like your screen to keep changing positions when your phone’s function also changes.

4G LTE Network

Whenever you try to buy a phone and do a quick research on that phone, you may come across a term called 4G LTE, not knowing what it is and what role it plays on that particle phone.
LTE stands for Long Term Evolution. 4G stands for Fourth Generation. LTE is a particular type of 4G.
It makes your network much faster. Using a 4G LTE smartphone on some networks could even mean that you can download files from the Internet up to 10 times faster than 3G.

Quad-core & Octa-core Processor Chips
Another aspect of smartphones that may sound like Chinese to an Englishman. A quad-core processor simply means that it has four processor cores, while Octa-core means it has 8. With Quad-core processor chips, each core can be put to work simultaneously on a given task. That enables swift and fluid multi-tasking, High-Resolution gaming, ultra-quick camera performance, and other such speedy tasks.

On the other hand, the more modern Octa-core chips have two sets of quad-core processors that split several tasks according to the type. At first, the lower-powered cores will be employed when the tasks are less. Then, when the more advanced tasks are needed, the higher-powered four cores will be employed. So, in a way, you could call the Octa-core processor a Dual Quad-core processor.

RAM & ROM

A lot of you may get confused at these terms and what role they play in a smartphone. RAM Stands for Random Access Memory. Whenever you run any application on a smartphone, it creates a temporary memory from it which goes to the RAM. Therefore, if your RAM is low and you are running too many memory-sucking apps simultaneously on your smartphone, it will freeze, and the apps will start crashing. When you restart the phone, the temporary Memory for the RAM gets deleted, and that is why you find that your smartphone will perform better after a reboot. On that basis, the higher the RAM of the phone, the better its performance.

ROM Stands for reading Only Memory. When it comes to smartphones, ROM may also be referred to as Internal Storage. That is basically where you can save your images, videos, music files, and as many other things as you’d like. The higher the ROM, the more files you can save on it. ROM does not have anything to do with the performance of the phone. It just simply serves as a memory-saving device.

4K Resolution

This feature has just recently come into play and is widely known as the future of smartphones. A 4K screen displays four times the number of pixels as a standard HD TV or phone screen.
In 2015, Sony released the Xperia Z5 Premium, the first-ever smartphone with a 4K Resolution screen. Given that other mobile devices already had 4K Video Recording capabilities before that. Still, they did not have the 4K Screen to display the full picture quality that a 4K Video possesses. That is because 4K Videos have such a high resolution that the full picture quality can only be displayed properly on a 4K TV or a phone with a 4K Resolution screen.

Different SIM Types

By now, you all know that the sizes of the sim cards are constantly changing, and it seems like every time you buy a new phone, you also have to get your sim card size reduced for it to work on the new device. That is part of a quest to make smartphones lighter and slimmer.
At first, we had the Standard sim cards that measured 25x15mm. These sim cards were used in all handsets before 2010, and plenty issued after that.

Then came the Micro Sim. The only difference between a standard sim and the micro sim was the plastic size around the microchip. A Micro Sim measures 15x12mm.
Now we have the Nano Sim, which was introduced in 2012. The smallest sim of them all measuring 12.3×8.8mm. Most of the new devices now use the Nano sim.