TIPS: How to identify the right smartphone for your needs

Today, it doesn’t take you a minute to see someone scrolling, chatting or just playing a game on their smartphone. The quick question then would be, how does one identify a smartphone that suits their needs out of the hundreds on sale in the market today. Jean Baguma, Huawei Uganda Devices Marketing Manager shares tips on the key features people should know before buying any smartphone.

• Operating System

If you love accessing a variety of free apps, Android operating system on a smartphone gives you so much options to choose from. As well, if you want more hardware choice and more control over the user experience, an Android powered smartphone should be your choice since it comes with better display, specifications and capability.

• Display

Tastes and preferences differ when it comes to screen size. If you love to watch lots of videos and play games, or read emails repetitively, a larger screen like for the Huawei Mate 8 would be ideal. Such smartphones are referred to as Phablets. If you usually use one hand with your smartphone and are busy engaged most of the time, you would then go for a smartphone with a smaller screen size such as the Huawei GR5

When it comes to resolution, almost everyone loves a smartphone with a full – HD display. Pay close attention to a smartphone’s resolution, brightness, colour quality and viewing angle before you buy it. This ensures that the pictures you take, wordings, videos will have more clarity on the phone display. Huawei offers several phones will full HD panels such as the Huawei GR5, Mate 8, P9 and P9 plus.

• Design

Defining a good or abad design is highly subjective but if you care about having a sleek finish, look out for a smartphone with a unibody design, which you’ll find in the Huawei G-Series, M-Series and the P-Series.

• Camera

We’ve now arrived at a point in smartphone evolution where the camera matters more than the processor, especially since most people use their phones as their primary shooters. More and more smartphones boast of cameras with at least 12 mega pixels, but don’t go by numbers alone. Instead pay close attention to the image quality, aperture, pixel size, speed and features. For example the Huawei P9’s dual Leica cameras perform a different trick, with one capturing picture  information in monochrome and the other in processing it in colour, resulting in a single sensor with a pixel size equivalent of 1.76 microns which is much bigger that the Galaxy S7’s 1.4 microns. This is the phone one would go for, for professional photography.

• Processor

A good processor inside a phone should translate to faster open times for apps, smoother game play and quicker photo editing. My advice is that people should take time and read independent reviews done of any smartphone you intend to buy such that you understand its processing speed, since no seller will tell you the whole truth on his device. Reviews are done by ordinary customers that have experienced the phone and would care less about its sales.

• Battery

Don’t settle for a smartphone with less than 3,000mAh battery life if endurance is really important to you. Consider a smartphone that lasts longer than 8 hours of straight 4G LTE surfing although 9 hours is even better. The Huawei Y6 Pro has Smart Power Saving technology that uses eight separate power-optimization approaches and can work in idle mode for 24 hours, with only 10% battery charge. The Y6 Pro is able to act as a charger for other electronics, providing 15 hours of data use, 39 hours of talk time, 48 hours of heavy use time, and 90 hours of light use time.

• Storage

For the space/storage lovers, here’s an easy way to look at a smartphone’s RAM, which is critically multitasking. Try to avoid handsets with just 1GB of system memory. On mid-tier devices, 2GB is good and standard but you’ll find 4GB on the latest flagships such as the Huawei Mate 8. Given that some games can easily take up the 1GB not to mention how many high-res photos and videos smartphone owners are capturing, we highly recommend opting for a much bigger internal storage. Huawei smartphones provide have an additional 128GB MicroSD slot.

• Fingerprint Security

Finger print security is an new innovation on some high-end smartphones making it hard for someone that is not the owner to unlock your device. If you need to protect your airtime, mobile money, pictures and videos from being tampered with by other people, then the fingerprint sensor locks such persons off your smartphone. To make it even better, with the finger print security feature, you can unlock your smartphone in a matter of seconds. For instance, Huawei smartphones have the fastest unlock sensor of less than 3 seconds at 360 degrees as opposed to other phone brands with sluggish sensors. Huawei’s smartphones with finger print sensors include Huawei’s Mate 8, GR5, P9 and P9 plus.