There has been a lot of news related to benchmarking lately, including an admission by Google that they blocked Play Store downloads of benchmarking apps during the Pixel 8 review embargo, as well as fresh chips coming down the pipeline by Qualcomm and MediaTek.
Discussion questions:
Do smartphone benchmarks matter?
Are they still a useful reference and do you consider them when shopping for an upgrade?
Are they still a useful reference and do you consider them when shopping for an upgrade?
No.
What do you prioritize instead?
Camera, battery life, size, screen, software features/bloat (in no particular order)
Battery life and screen quality first and foremost. They’re often related to each-other. Battery life because I feel it’s the one aspect that hasn’t improved very much at all over the past 10 years, and if I don’t have enough battery, I literally can’t use my phone. Screen quality because I look at the screen whatever I do with the phone, so if the screen is bad, everything else cannot make it a better phone.
If anything, battery life is a bigger issue now because you can't just swap batteries like you could 10 years ago. You could have a backup battery fully charged and ready to go, or if you were like me you could just buy a triple capacity aftermarket replacement battery and have an extra chonky phone.
All those options are gone now. When the battery dies, you either pay $80 for someone to replace it or (more commonly) trade it in for a new phone that's marginally better.
Storage space, support cycle, type of screen, third party OS support, aftermarket accessories, camera quality. Size.
Also kinda part of the SoC, but the frequencies supported since I travel a lot.
I think phones have been fast enough for a while now. There's more to a SoC than speed. When I came back to Android, I went from the fastest iPhone to a SD480 with only 6GB of RAM and it was...fine for daily use. But the camera was a big letdown on that device so I got something a little bit better a year later.