Rapid Advances in Smartphone Technology Herald a New World of Connectivity

Some people may remember the introduction of the first affordable mobile phones to the Australian market in the early ‘90s. When compared to the smartphones that we have today, they seem positively ancient! Commonly called bricks, these early mobile phones were large and cumbersome. Phone towers were few and far between back then, and coverage was common only in large cities. Unlike the powerhouse phones of today, it was also necessary to carry at least one spare battery around because they were so power hungry.

To the youth of today, those old phones must truly seem ancient. Nowadays, our smartphones not only double as our still and video cameras, but also our means of accessing the web and downloading information from all corners of the world. If someone had described a phone like the Oppo R9 Plus to someone living in the late 1980s, they would have either scoffed at the fiction of it or become wide-eyed at the possibilities of the digital future.

It has been a long time since mobile phones were used simply to make calls or send text messages. Due to advancements in the miniaturisation of crucial components, such as the CPU, our mobile phones are now more powerful than ever before. Consider just some of the features of some of the best smartphones available on the market today:

● CPU power: The Central Processing Unit is crucial to the functioning of the smartphone, and more powerful units provide more horsepower for resource-intensive tasks and applications. The best smartphones on the market today feature octa-core CPUs. In layman’s terms, this means that the phone is powered by 8 CPU chips all working together to allow some of the most sophisticated multi-tasking available.

● Camera: It used to be that making photos was something that we only ever did with our big cameras, but times have changed, and we now expect all of our mobile phones to have a dedicated camera built-in. The best phones available, including the Oppo, feature some of the largest digital sensors around and pack in up to 16 megapixels of resolution.

● HD screen: Most often the weak point of cheaply made phones is a screen that does not perform well in bright light or has poor viewing angles. The best phones feature high-definition screens that are viewable in all types of light, feature good viewing angles, and will display graphics and fonts smoothly.

● RAM: The capacity of a smartphone to multi-task and operate smoothly is really a combination of the speed of the CPU and the Random Access Memory (RAM) available to store information. In cheaply made phones, the common downfall is in the relatively small amount of RAM that they feature. With all of the resource hungry applications available and the expectations we have that phones should do what we want in good time, the best phones on the market feature at least 3 gigabytes of RAM. Indeed, the better phones even feature up to 4 gigabytes for superior speed and application handling.