I understand I have to answer your question. I am sure there are a number of important features I would forget but just quickly off the top of my head, this is why asking for specs may not be crazy for people who are members of this forum, if not for our computer illiterate friends and family.:
• I think it is more than legitimate to address things like significant (30% or more) Battery Life differences in addition to the ability of being able to swap batteries and ease of charging them.
• Processor speed in relation to battery life.
• Resolution and quality of displayed images.
• Picture/video taking capabilities, most important of which is the end result (the quality of pictures and video).
• If we can on a whim, insert a microSD sd card, small or big, that's a micro removable hard drive right there that you can use to transfer everything from work data to entire movies or videos of your family. I understand that some phones do not have removable storage? I respect someone's "Experience" arguments, but not to be able to use removable physical storage would be a major handicap, wouldn't it?
• Features unique to a specific phone, be it water resistance out of the box, or finger print lock/unlock/purchase technology or similar.
• If one phone has twice as much RAM as the other one, that may be somewhat of a big deal when it comes to having a super-fast computing experience on it.
I don't know if that comment was a joke, but making a major purchase and not looking at specs is like buying the original iPhone which had major functionality drawbacks when compared to alternatives at the time.
No my comment wasn't a joke. You didn't understand it.
You can not compare Apples to Android. You can compare the specs of iphones to iphones. Androids to Androids.
No amount of specs will get you an ios experience, no amount of specs will get you an Android experience!
So first you need to know what eco systen you like. After determining that, you can compare phone specs in that eco system.
The iphone can have better specs and speed in benchmarks and it does because its so close to the metal, using less RAM(Albeit faster). It also has the better camera.
These facts would never make me give up Android. I like the OS, the widgets, Google's eco sytem, Google now, Google's voice search, Google's navigation, Live wallpaper, lower cost, 4K video, etc.
My daughter and most all of her friends on the other hand would never switch to Android because of specs or for any reason.Apple has Facetime, imessage, camera, compatibility, with other Apple devices.
Every high end phone today has spec's high enough as to make them the least important thing to consider. This is what i am trying to point out.
Now if you are coming from flip phone and its your first entry into smart phones. You have no connection to ios or Google. I would still say to you find out which eco system you think you'll like and than choose the specs in that eco system.
If some of the things you mentioned are that important...
Removable Storage
Removable Battery
These are not even available on iphone.
Screen resolution is going to be close, even at 720P Apple does things with the resolution of the icons that make them higher res. It will make less of a difference when comparing to 1080P screens.
Battery life about equal. I use a battery pack...
Camera's....iphone wins, but it will always come down to the operator. The camera's on the best phones are all really good.
As in computers if you do not keep them tuned up...OS clean.
You'll lose any gain in speed, one Soc may have over another.
Thats another reason specs mean little.
I just think folks should look at buying phones from a different angle. It might be as important to look at the color or design of the phone rather than an Antutu benchmark. My wife's new One+ is 15K points higher on that benchmark than my Nexus 5. Its not any faster though, at least not that you could notice.
The last of your comments is telling. When the iphone came out there were no alternative. It was unique. Didn't buy one due to the major shortcoming's...No 3G, Price, 8GB of storage.
We are so far from that now. Its like picking a car, they all go way faster than you need to go, so you buy one that you like. One that has a radio that works best with either ios or Android.
