If you have ever bought a phone in the last few years, you must have come in words like import and Snapdragon. And you must have heard about General 3 and or numbers like 9000 and 7. In addition, you must have heard or seen words like 16GB RAM, or vapor chamber cooling, or UFS 3.0. Combined together, these words try to sell a story to buyers. And the story is always Rosie. This goes something like this: because this phone has a dragon inside it, or something called imports, which reads like the name of a mythical mineral from the Marvel Universe, it is the best and fastest phone that you can buy. The story, however, is most likely, the way most marketing stories are.

This is because these zoom and varroom are two aspects about the speed of the phone. One, how fast or slow your phone is, it depends not just on the chipset but on hundreds of other factors. And two, how fast you want your phone to have a very different question, how fast your phone is really.

Let’s deal with the first part. Nowadays there are tens of different chipsets, and hundreds are different hardware combinations that can be found in the phone. The nature of these devices is that you cannot find two phones which have the same hardware. Of course, a chipset such as Demensity 9400 or Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite is the heart of a phone. But from the chipset alone you cannot detect the performance of the phone, possibly in the benchmark, where companies also cheat. As soon as they recognize that a user is running a benchmark, some brands of phones dynamically adjust the performance to the maximum impact. But beyond the benchmark, the presence of a chipset does not say anything important about the performance of the phone.

This means that you can have a smartphone with a smartphone 9400 which is much better in performance compared to Snapdragon 8 Gan 3. And on the contrary, whatever story is trying to sell the phone brand.

Are essentially – and it is to make it simple – two aspects of the performance of a phone. There is a chipset. This means what is in the chipset of your phone, and at what speed these core can run at the peak, and how long at the peak. The second aspect is auxiliary hardware. You see that we talk about chipset, not only the chip, which is a processor. Chipset is a chip plus auxiliary hardware, thus it becomes a chip-set. This is the reason why the speed of a phone also depends on how much storage it has and at what speed it can be accessed, and at how much speed it is inside and at what speed it runs, and how it cools the chipset, how much voltage of the phone can safely and continuously, and how the overall performance is tunned with micro-controller and software.

As you can see, there are tens of tens. This only makes it almost impossible to predict the performance of the phone from your chipset. It is claimed that phone companies tell about gaming performance of a device, or multi-tasking, or continuous display, or cooling claims, they all need to be taken with a pinch of salt. There are many variable factors that are impossible to be certain.

Here is a simplified example: there are two phones that you are considering. Both are powered by Snapdragon 8 elite chipset. But one of them uses UFS 4.0 storage, while the other is limited to UFS 3.0 storage (slow reading and writing speed). Similarly, one rapidly in LPDDR5x 16GB RAM is running at a speed of 4267mHz, while the other uses 16GB LPDDR5X with a speed of 3200 MHz. With everything else being the same, one of these phones is being mentioned, even if both have the same chipset, the same speed and the same display with the same chipset with tuning.

But how much speed do you need?

This is the second part of this debate: just how fast your phone needs? 20 to 15 years ago, unlike computers, where fast chipset also meant to a large extent and much better performance, nothing in the mobile phone has anything as a clear cut. This is for many reasons.

Applications and software on a phone are not the best possible hardware but tuned for the most widely available hardware. This means whether you play the call of duty mobile on a phone of Rs 30,000 or on a phone of Rs 80,000, the possibility that the experience is going to be a large extent. This is also because the apps on the phone have dynamically adjust their various performance parameters based on hardware. This happens in subtle ways. For example, a game on a mainstream phone will shut down dynamic lighting or blooming, while on a premium phone it will increase them. On a small screen, and in the crowd of gaming action, you will not notice this difference either.

Given how a phone display depends on factors such as cooling, battery quality, touch screen reaction and software tuning, nowadays it is almost impossible to find a slow phone above Rs 20,000 to Rs 30,000 to Rs 30,000. They all go quite well, they are all very good.

For example, currently I am reviewing the Pixel 10 phone. On paper, they have a weak chipset compared to things like Snapdragon 8 Elite. But in use I find them better than most high end Android phones. My experience was with some Nathing Phone 3, a phone that can have an anemic chipset relative to its price, but still has a fast-stricken phone and it offers a completely unreliable experience.

Instead of chipset, there are other areas of a phone that matters more. For example, camera performance. This greatly affects your experience with your phone. Similarly, battery life. Or how well the phone goes on. Or how good and bright the quality of your performance is, or how loud and completely the voice of its speakers is. These are also parts where more quality – not only better glasses but also quality – often means high price. This is an accurate reason that you can have a phone cost of Rs 40,000, which contains the same chipset that you can also find in a phone of Rs 70,000. But other parts, until the company is just trying to hood customers, is likely to be much better in more expensive phones.

So, next time you go in search of a phone, do not pay much attention to the chipset. Any phone above Rs 20,000 to Rs 30,000 is going to be theoretically fast which you want to do on your phone. The actual purpose and experience of a phone is not determined by chipset. It is determined by the rest of the hardware. And that, most often, does not appear in the benchmark.