SmartPhones: Jack of All Trades, Master of None

 Recently I found another Example of why Smart Phones can be okay at everything, but not really great at many of those things.  

We all know smart phones have evolved cameras that can rival a cheap point and shoot camera, and have Internet connections that get faster each year.

If fact, if you have DSL and a 5 year old budget computer, but a brand new phone with 5G, there is a good chance that your phone has more memory, more storage, and faster internet.  

Yes, a decent SLR or mirrorless camera can easily beat even the best smart phone at taking pictures.  There are a few reasons for this.  One is the sensor size.  With very few exceptions, such as the Sony Exeria Pro-I, smart phones have small sensors.  Sadly, physics dictates an upper limit to quality in this case, which is especially noticeable in lower light conditions where thermal noise is more of an issue.  Likewise, larger lenses can gather more light but nobody would want to carry around a huge phone that can't fit in their pocket and where the lens makes up most of the volume and weight.  There is also the reality of economics: A high end camera can cost many thousands of dollars, but few people would want to pay thousands more for their phone.  Since cost and physics are major issues here, smart phones will probably never be able to catch up at the higher end.  

 The same display technologies are not the best at everything either.  For example, LCD and OLED are best for most of what people want to do on their phones, eInk works better for books.  Since the refresh rate for eInk is painful for things like watching videos, or even for general usage, eBooks will likely remain a separate market segment for a very long time.  

You might also ask the likes of Panasonic are able to sell dedicated GPS units and why Garmin and others are able to sell cycling computers.  I've covered this before, but the GPS, altimeter, and compass chips on most smart phones just aren't the best ones.  If there is a choice between a $1 part, a $5 part, and a $15 part, smart phone makers are going to opt for the cheapest part that works so they can check the box labeled "GPS Enabled" on their spec sheet that.  Dedicated navigation units have things like multi-constellation support, dual-band support, etc.  Even the premium flagship models typically have weak navigation hardware.  

For cycling computers, this difference becomes worse, because while an OLED screen looks great for watching movies indoors, it is nearly impossible to read at a glance in bright direct sunlight, whereas a front-lit reflective screen may not have the same rich colors, but is perfectly fine outdoors.  Some smart phones are waterproof, but most can't be properly operated while wet, as the screen will react to rain falling on it and register raindrops as touch events.  Likewise, gloves are an issue with most models.  Even on smart phones that have a glove mode, this works by raising the sensitivity, which makes the rain issues worse!  So the touch screen on your iPhone or Xperia may offer instant response and silky smooth motion, it's basically unusable for all weather cycling.  

Smart phone makers *could* use more expensive and capable GPS chips, but optimizing the display and touch components for outdoor use would result in a smart phone that is less compelling for ordinary indoor use.  

Another genre I was previously aware of, but recently tested myself is audio equipment.  I own several pairs of wireless headphones and they work great.  In particular, noise cancelling technology has improved vastly in just the past few years.  It's to the point where I can ride the train, and when I put my headphones on, all of the noise just vanishes into nothingness.  If I am not playing any music, I can still hear some of the surrounding noise, but 95% or more is blocked out, and as soon as I start playing music, it effectively disappears completely.  There is a down-side, though - I have missed my stop more than once because of that!  

I used to have a high end MiniDisc player back in the late 90s and early 2000s.  I used the stop headphones, and it sounded... fantastic.  I finally let it go because I figured my smart phone would be just as good.  I didn't have to fiddle with disks anymore, and I could have wireless earphones - Modern!  Fancy!

But after buying progressively better and better wireless earphones, I've noticed that Bluetooth audio just doesn't sound as good as my Minidisc audio did.  It's perfectly "fine", but it's not "Wow!" level fantastic.  Given a choice between the MD player or my smart phone plus decent noise cancelling wireless earphones when I ride the train, I would take the smartphone every time - but to listen at home in a quiet room, I would still take the MD player every day of the week and twice on Sundays.  

So why is this?  Well, there are several reasons:

1. Much of the audio we listen to on smart phones tends to be streaming, and compressed - poorly.  For example, YouTube music is very convenient, but it really just doesn't sound very good at all to me.  The ATRAC encoding used on MD always sounded better to me than MP3 files, especially low bit rate files.  

2. Using Bluetooth just doesn't give you the best possibly quality - which may be partly compression and partly because of #3.

3. Even if you use wired audio with an uncompressed source, the device you are using has a DAC which coverts the digital signal into analog, and then an amplifier which makes the signal stronger to the point that it can be used to drive your headphones.  Both of these components can vary in price from $5 to many thousands of dollars.  Even assuming that for driving a headphone anything above $500 is audiophile snake oil, it is almost certainly true that a $5 DAC + Amplifier will have less fidelity than a $50 one.  But here's the question - Do you think smart phone makers include $100 DACs and Amplifiers into Smart phones?  Of course not.  You might not be able to hear the different on the cheap ear buds they typically bundle anyway!  If you are using bluetooth earphones, then the DAC and amplifiers  being used are in the earphones themselves, but those are also being built with restrictions on size, power consumption, and price.  

So if you think about it, most people listening with a smart phone are in one of two situations:

a. They are using the cheap built-in DAC and amplifier of the phone to listen to highly compressed music from YouTube or a similar source, using cheap headphones included in the box.

or

b. They are again listening to highly compressed music from YouTube or a similar source, again streamed through a lossy bluetooth connection to a pair of wireless earbuds that is necessarily constrained in design.  

Either way, the source material is suspect, the DAC and amplification are suspect, and the earphone quality may be suspect.  

Even in the usual best case scenario, they may be using a premium pair of headphones with better quality (but still lossily compressed) music from somewhere like Amazon Music or Apple Music, it is still a situation full of compromises.  

Compare all of this to the MiniDisc experience:

1. Tracks use either high bit-rate lossy encoding, or lossless encoding.  Either way, they are specifically targeting high quality audio.

2. The DAC and amplifier are almost for sure going to be more expensive and complex parts with a focus on audio quality.

3. The connection is wired.

4. Even if you use the included headphones, they were almost always better than the headphones included with smart phones - and many people upgraded them.  

I decided to test a half-way decent (but not obscenely expensive) pair of wired earphones  (XBS-N3)with my Smart Phone, and sure enough, they sounded noticeably better than any of the wireless options I tried.  This was even true when I compared the same headphones using a Bluetooth receiver.  I also have a paid of headphones which has both wireless and wired moves.  This one was a bit more of a wash.  I suspect the headphones have a better DAC and Amplifier than the phone.  

But then I tried a recent Sony Walkman (the NX-507) - wow.  Totally different.