TechNow: Mobile flagships of H1 2014 are not the spec-busters you wanted, butdon't be disappointed.... ;)

     About a year ago, in CES 2013 Las Vegas, Quallcomm Inc. introduced to the world a new line up of mobile SoCs: Snapdragon 200, Snapdragon 400, Snapdragon 600 & Snapdragon 800. While the Snapdragon 600 powered the flagships of H1 2013, the Snapdragon 800 only started appearing on phones in H2 of 2013, starting with the Sony Xperia z Ultra. The Snapdragon 800 powered almost every flagship of H2 2013. 

    On 20th November, 2013... Quallcomm showed the world a new generation Snapdragon 805 chipset with better 2.5GHz Krait 450 quad-core processor and 4K capable Adreno 420 graphics, but it was scheduled to enter mass production not before Q2 2014. 

    So, to equip the flagships of H1 2014, Quallcomm introduced the Snapdragon 801, a slightly overclocked version of the Snapdragon 800 with faster memory bus. 

    The Sony Xperia Z2, Samsung Galaxy S5 & the yet to be announced HTC One (2014) will sport the 801. In terms of performance, the 801 won't beat the 800. It will just give better results in benchmarks. 

    Every year, mobile oems increase the display resolution of their flagships. 2012 was the year of 720p HD, 2013 was the year of 1080p Full HD...... but the first half of 2014 is still rocking 1080p displays. On June 24, 2010, Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple Inc. introduced the 'Retina Display' with the iPhone 4. He said that the human eye perceives any image on a display with over 300ppi to be super fine and sharp. 1080p displays on 5" to 5.5" smartphones usually sport a pixel density of about 400 to 440 ppi. This is way above "Retina" territory, so any 1080p display will be spectular, making the presence of a 2k (1440p) display an overkill and a strain on the GPU and battery.

     So when you compare a Galaxy S4 to a Galaxy S5 or an Xperia Z1 to an Xperia Z2 or an HTC One (2013) to an HTC One (2014), don't make a sheer specifications comparisons.... Keep in mind that the devices in their current configuration can offer you blazzing fast performance on an excellent display. :)

        NOTE: If you want a 2K display along with other killer specs, check out the Oppo Find 7

The HTC One (2013) with the yet unannounced all new HTC One (2014)
Unannounced as of time of writing.

The Samsung Galaxy S5 (right) besides the Samsung Galaxy S4

The Sony Xperia Z1 (left) along side the Sony Xperia Z2 (right)
Note the similarity in the specifications of the devices