November 13, 2021

My Samsung S4 Galaxy

I am starting to shop for a replacement for this thing, so I thought it might be helpful to list some specs.
Released March 2013
Android 5 (Lollipop)
5.0 inch display
1080 x 1920 pixels (44 ppi)
Exynos 5410 chipset (8 core)
4 1.6 Ghz A15 and 4 1.2 Ghz A7
16G internal flash
2G ram
SD card slot
13 mpixel main camera
1080p video at 30 fps
GPS and GLONASS
2600 mAh batter, 17 hour talk time
4G/LTE
Whenever I look at these specs (8 core ARM running at 1.6 Ghz) I ask myself: "Why is Android so miserably slow?". It should be possible to just blow the doors off with all of this, yet I touch a button and wait for seconds, sometimes many seconds, for things that I know are local to my phone. Is this the price we pay for writing all the Android apps in Java? Who knows? Will things be better with Android 12 on a newer phone? Maybe, but I'm not holding my breath.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Cell Phones / tom@mmto.org