Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Smartphone Screen Speed – Can You Spot The Difference?”.
So I just had a weird experience. I picked up an old device that was sitting around. I had to get something off of it: 60 Hertz device – and it’s not that long ago I was using a 60 Hertz device as a daily driver, but I had this weird experience having been using these higher refresh rate phones, where the 60 Hertz device just felt So slow and laggy, almost like my brain, had completely reconfigured itself, based on the fast refresh rate device devices that I’ve used recently, so stepping backwards actually helped me to see the difference more vividly than I had in the past when stepping forward – and I realized that Through video, it’s actually been kind of hard to show you guys these differences and if you haven’t, had the chance to try a higher refresh rate phone you’re kind of just going on the word of individuals online. Making videos like this telling you hey it’s a massive difference, it’s a crazy effect and the weird part about the effect is that it makes the 60 Hertz phones feel substantially slower from a processing perspective.
Because for me, the number one place that I actually witnessed. This difference is in the menu system on your home feed in your app selection in your settings menus and things like this. Yes, of course you cannotice it in games and elsewhere, and there are plenty of apps that don’t support these higher refresh rates.
So you’re not gon na see it there, but just the general daily use of your phone you’ve noticed I’ve got a number of devices on the table. I’M going to attempt to showcase this difference by slowing down the footage so that you watching it back. Regardless of your refresh rate on your phone or computer display, so you can see the difference and the gaps and the missing frames, essentially when you’re dealing with a slower, refresh rate device. So in front of me, I have an iPhone 11 Pro max 60 Hertz device. I have the pixel 4 XL, which, as you know, is a 90 Hertz refresh device. I have the latest top-tier Samsung, the s20 Ultra 120 Hertz device and then on the far right.
I think one of the only if not the only one for forty-four Hertz refresh device that I featured recently the new red magic 5g, which has all kinds of specialized gaming features to take advantage of that refresh rate. But I’ve just gone ahead and set it to 144 Hertz right within the OS within the settings for everything that the phone does at the expense potentially of battery life. When you bring up your apps and you kind of just scroll through them in this fashion. Right here at first, it might not be evident to you, but as your brain gets reprogrammed to this type of motion blur or lack thereof, there’s this extra clarity and snappiness.
That comes along with your input, and this is an area in which I feel like phones, touchscreen devices tablets, as is the case with the newer iPads. When your input is touch. This experience is an even bigger deal or an even bigger improvement than it is on a display that you don’t touch directly where you use a mouse like a computer display. This is an incredibly twitchy and smooth experience, and the effect is that you feel like the phone is just way faster than it is then, of course, on the iPhones.
It becomes obvious, you’re missing frames. Your brain is missing frames. Now you might just be used to it, but once you’ve adapted to the new thing, your brain goes. Where are those missing frames? It just somehow becomes far more evident those frames that are missing they pop up, even in this sort of Micro Scrolls, where you can see your text jumping more on a slower display, even as you sort of move through it slowly and again, very difficult to showcase.
On camera very evident to your eyeballs that nothing is missing there, it’s all incredibly, smooth and hopefully slowing down. This footage gives you a better idea of how that difference operates as much as gaming has been the marketing mechanism for a lot of these high refresh rate phones and certainly above 120 Hertz, and I could see people. Obviously, the gaming community pushed the high refresh rates on the traditional computer on the PC side.
But for me it’s a lot more about the daily use and the feeling of speed and freshness on your phone. Now, obviously, we’re far into the land of nuance and it’s a very specific difference and you have to be tuned up yourself to notice that difference. But I just had this weird experience of stepping back to 60 and having a whole new appreciation all over again.
For what’s happening at 120 and beyond, if you’re like me at all, and you have an appreciation for snappiness and the speed of the thing and just the general usability and the legibility to when you’re reading long articles scrolling and you like to sort of stop and Then scroll a little more slowly, there also seems to be less fatigue, at least for me. It’S an improvement that maybe in many ways gives you the experience of performance, possibly even more so than the processing power of the device on its own granted to support these high refresh rates, you will need the processing power that’s mandatory as well, but anyway hope. That was interesting to you. Let me know if you can spot the difference. Also, let me know what refresh rate are you using right now on your smartphone .