
Choosing a smartphone isn’t as easy as most people think it is. There are so many people that think you can simply go in to a shop or whatever, get some advice from the staff that work there and then purchase the phone that they recommended to you. However, it’s not always as simple as that unfortunately. If you’re like me, you’ll want to get a smartphone which can do everything that you want it to do and when there’s a good chance that you’ll be paying in the region of £200+ for a decent smartphone, you really shouldn’t just purchase one because somebody else told you that it’s good. The days of choosing a phone on its looks since it was just for calling or texting people are long gone now, in today’s world a good smartphone can do anything that your desktop or laptop can do, so it takes a lot more time now to decide which smartphone you should buy. Once you decide on getting a new smartphone, you should think about some of these factors before purchasing a smartphone:
• Battery Life – Battery life is among of the first things you should look out for when you’re searching for your new smartphone. Think about it this way, there’s absolutely no point having the best phone in the world if the battery can only last an hour or so. There can be huge differences from one smartphone to another, so make sure that you compare them. More and more people want to use smartphones for more than just calling or texting people, nearly everyone wants to be able to email people on to move, get the latest news stories while they are out and so on, so make sure that the phones battery life can last long enough for you to do all of this! (if that’s what you’d want of course)
• Keyboard – How long do you usually keep a mobile phone for? Probably over a year, right? How much of that time would you spend using the smartphones keyboard, it’d probably be a very long time! This is why you should make sure that you like the keyboard before buying any smartphone. Nobody wants to spend a fortune on a piece of technology that they cannot use to its full potential since it annoys them to use it. The type of keyboard that people like ranges from one person to another, some people like physical keyboards while others prefer keyboards that are on the screen, otherwise known as virtual keyboards. Here’s another point to remember though, just because you like virtual keyboards doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll like every type of smartphone that has a virtual keyboard. Every one has its own software for the keyboard, some are faster than others, some need you to press on the screen harder than others etc. For example, just because you like the keyboard that’s on the iPhone doesn’t mean that you’ll like the virtual keyboard that’s on another touchscreen phone.
• Storage Space – So many people are starting to use their smartphone for much more than just a phone nowadays, which means that you’ll need more space to store all of these files. If you have hundreds or even thousands of photos, songs or whatever you’ll need a decent amount of space on your mobile phone to store all of this data. Nearly all top notch smartphones come with built in memory, such as 16GB. This will let you save a lot of stuff on to your phone but over time you could easily need more than this. But here’s the problem, does you phone have a slot for a memory card? If it doesn’t you’re out of luck, but if it does that gives you loads of options. You could purchase a cheap memory card that’ll allow you to store some more files on your phone or if you need more storage space you could spend a little bit extra!
• Camera / Video Recordings – There’s no reason to own a digital camera anymore to be honest, since nearly all smartphones have a good camera built in. If the camera quality really matters to you, I wouldn’t recommend that you decide which one is better just because one has more megapixels. It’s a much better idea to try test it out for yourself, take a picture on the phone and see how it compares to the other. Most stores have display models that you can test out to see what its camera quality is like but if you can’t try this you could just search online and see what others think of it.
• Apps – If you think that you’d spend a lot of time on your smartphone using apps then it’s a good idea to compare one phone to another. Some phones will have a very limited number of apps which might be something that you don’t want to deal with while other phones like Apple and Android phones would give you a much better choice of apps to choose from.
• Screen Display – Not that many people worry about the screen display that’s on their smartphone. It’s usually one of the things that people forget to even think about when they want to buy their new mobile phone. This is quite weird since you’ll spend nearly all of your time staring at the screen when you’re using it so you want it to be good! In most cases, cheap smartphones won’t let you see the screen very well in any kind of sunlight, while more expensive ones should let you do this without any trouble. If you have a high budget for a smartphone, take a look at AMOLED screens – they are stunning!
• Multitasking / Processor – If you’re planning on using your smartphone a lot, you’ll more than likely be running several apps at once. Let’s say you want to listen to music, have a FaceBook app open in the background and send a text message all at once, this would put a bit of pressure on your phones processor. If you don’t have a good processor it’ll force some of the apps to shut down by itself, which isn’t something that you want to happen if you’re doing something that’s important.
We recommend you narrow your phone choice down to 3 or 4 handsets then compare their features side by side using our compare mobile phones tool you can then compare deals from the whole market by clicking “Show Deals”.