Every Android phone basically uses the same chip anyway when you go out and buy a gaming PC you know that you're getting a box that prioritizes GPU performance so the games run better but with a phone that's just not the case if you're a flagship phone in 2019 you're pretty much going to be packing the Snapdragon 805 and in this chip the CPU and the GPU are fixed it's not like razor could look at it and be like okay we're going to add 30% more graphics cores to this so that our gaming phone is actually better at gaming and this leads me on to the next thing there are minimal performance improvements so almost the annoying part here is that even though these gaming phones are using the same chips the companies try to make their phones look more powerful and the way they go about doing this is wasteful inefficient and also kind of misleading take the ASUS rob phone this is marketed as having an overclocked chip for maximum performance but all they've actually done is changed the clock speed of four of the eight CPU cores and then suggested that you use an external fan to help bring the temperatures back down and guess what the overclocked speed is a two point nine six gigahertz which makes it a 0.16 gigahertz overclock from basically every other phone and then when you also factor in that they've overclocked the CPU not the GPU which is what might actually increase gaming frame rates you end up with still worse gaming performance than the iPhone 10s and that phone still manages to look clean and sophisticated and then you've got the fact that companies like Xiaomi and are starting to add 10 gigabytes of RAM to the gaming phones and the problem is that by the time Android is properly using 10 gigs of RAM the rest of the hardware is going to be well out of date I could completely deal with the above issues if it weren't for the fact that these phones are not built practically I agree they look cool to a certain demographic but with every gaming phone I've held the aggressive design language has come at the cost of okay mix these companies ditch these soft curves that help ferns fit so nicely in our hands and replaced them with flat angular edges not to mention LEDs that you can't even see while you're using the phone and just end up wasting battery generally speaking nobody has a separate phone for gaming you have one phone that you want to be able to use for everything so it doesn't make sense to sacrifice on other important things you'll use your phone for like taking photos and videos I'm yet to use a camera on a gaming phone and be like yep that takes really great photos and it's considered okay because well cameras aren't the priority here but the problem is that your camera experience ends up suffering a lot more than your gaming experience is elevated so you're just getting a worse phone and then we've got the support these gaming phones are not selling in the millions sometimes not even in the hundreds of thousands that makes them ultra-niche devices and this brings a whole nether slew of problems game developers will not optimize games specifically for your phone
when something goes wrong good luck finding specific bug fixes
and you're most probably going to run into compatibility issues and even when
games do work the chance that they will take advantage of your high refresh
rate or surround sound speakers or ultrasonic pressure sensors is very slim and
then maybe most importantly we've got just the fact that mobile games don't
need it given that we're not really getting any extra performance with a gaming
phone these companies have had to make what I'd call alternative features which
is why we're seeing things like two separate USB charging ports on the same
phone one millisecond response times and super high screen refresh rates the chunkiness
of using your fingers on a touchscreen means that the difference between one millisecond
five millisecond and ten millisecond is not going to affect gameplay in the
slightest I do feel like a 90 Hertz or even a 120 Hertz displayed does add
something tangible they make a phone feel much more fluid but that's one of
those things that isn't limited to a gaming phone and I'm pretty sure in 2019
standard flagship phones will also have high refresh rate displays kind of like
how we've seen on the productivity focused iPad Pro the razor phone house
awesome speakers but again that's not something that's reserved to gaming
phones recent devices from Samsung and Apple have pretty similar performance
and are examples of phones that do it all it is true that the rock phone
especially can do a lot more than standard flagships because of the accessories
they sell with it but after having spent over a month with it now I just can't
see the viability of it how many people will spend two hundred dollars for a
box that lets them play a phone game on their TV or three hundred dollars for a
device that gives you two displays it's cool don't get me wrong but it's just
really impractical alright runt over for no