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GLOSSARY Today’s smartphones come equipped with a very comprehensive set of camera related specifications. Our smartphone, for many of us, has become our primary camera due to it being the one we always have with us. In its purest form, smartphone photography is all about collecting photons (light) and converting them into electrons (image). The capabilities of the supporting hardware and software are paramount to producing high-quality images of your chosen subject. Image Signal Processor (ISP) An equally important part of the smartphone camera experience is the Image Signal Processor (ISP), this is part of the silicon within a smartphones chip-set/CPU and in conjunction with the phone's software and OS provides additional enhancements and special effects when both capturing images and to the pictures once captured. These include face detection, filters, panoramic scene capturing and object identification. Images are also geo-tagged with the GPS coordinates of where th...

GLOSSARY Today’s smartphones come equipped with a very comprehensive set of camera related specifications. Our smartphone, for many of us, has become our primary camera due to it being the one we always have with us. In its purest form, smartphone photography is all about collecting photons (light) and converting them into electrons (image). The capabilities of the supporting hardware and software are paramount to producing high-quality images of your chosen subject. Image Signal Processor (ISP) An equally important part of the smartphone camera experience is the Image Signal Processor (ISP), this is part of the silicon within a smartphones chip-set/CPU and in conjunction with the phone's software and OS provides additional enhancements and special effects when both capturing images and to the pictures once captured. These include face detection, filters, panoramic scene capturing and object identification. Images are also geo-tagged with the GPS coordinates of where th...

GLOSSARY The secondary camera on a modern smart phone is often known as the front facing camera or 'selfie' cam. The technologies detailed in the primary camera definition also apply to the secondary camera. The front facing camera is most commonly used for capturing self portraits/group shots for Social Media and video calling. Additionally, the front facing cameras work in conjunction with supplemental technology to provide face-detection for smart phone security. Android has had the ability to unlock your phone via rudimentary facial Recognition called Face Unlock since Version 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich was unveiled on October 19, 2011. This has never been advertised as secure though. In Sept 2017, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was the first Samsung phone to introduce iris scanning to provide a secure method of unlocking a phone. FaceID is made even more robust as 'depth' can also be sensed by using the camera in conjunction with the new technology. A byproduct of this is ...

GLOSSARY The loudspeaker is a small sound driver fitted within a mobile phone, or other communication device, which is used to produce sound. Traditionally, loudspeakers on mobile phones are used to produce sound alerts for events such as incoming calls, incoming messages and alarms. Since mobile phones have started doubling as portable music players in recent years, users have begun using their built-in speakers for playback of music. Acknowledging this new type of use of the mobile phone loudspeaker, manufacturers have begin to equip their music or video-centric mobiles with more powerful loudspeakers or even a pair of loudspeakers for accurate stereo reproduction and enhanced spatial effects. Loudspeakers are also used to reproduce voice calls out loud, thus allowing users to deal with calls hands-free or even have conference calls with others in the same room (that use of the mobile phone is called a speakerphone, which is not to be confused with a loudspeaker). Loudspeaker impleme...

GLOSSARY A common connector for plugging in a standard pair of music headphones such as the ones found on music players, computers and most other electronic devices with audio outputs. It can support stereo and/or microphone, depending on the number of separate connector rings on the jack. Some phones offer only a 2.5 mm jack, which is a smaller variety of the same principle. Headphones supplied with mobile phones usually have a mic somewhere along the cable and a remote button that allows for managing calls without using the phone. Some manufacturers opt for placing a 3.5mm audio jack on this remote control instead of directly on the phone itself. The reason for this is that 3.5mm jacks take up quite a lot of internal space; plus, in this way the user gets to keep the remote control/mic functionality while using third-party headphones.

GLOSSARY Wi-Fi is a WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) technology. It provides short-range wireless high-speed data connections between mobile data devices (such as laptops, PDAs or phones) and nearby Wi-Fi access points (special hardware connected to a wired network). The older variant of Wi-Fi, 802.11g, is capable of providing speeds of up to 54Mbps and is backwards compatible with 802.11b (providing up to 11Mbps). The more recent standard is called 802.11n (offering speeds of up to 150Mbps per channel or up to 600Mbps in total). It can be used in the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz frequency bands, though a receiver needs to have dual-band antenna to operate on both. 2013 saw the birth of the latest (so far) Wi-Fi ac standard. It allows for speeds of up to 500 Mbps per channel and over 1Gbps in total. Wi-Fi 802.11ac operates only on the 5GHz band. Wi-Fi is much faster than any data technologies operating through the cellular network like GPRS, EDGE and even UMTS and HSDPA. The range covered by a W...

  GLOSSARY Bluetooth is a wireless protocol for exchanging data over short distances from fixed and mobile devices, creating personal area networks. There are two important parameters of Bluetooth devices - class and supported profiles. "Class" signifies the distance at which a Bluetooth connection is possible. Most mobile devices are Class 2, which means they have a range of up to 10 m. Class 1 devices are rare and have a range of up to 100 feet. A "profile" is a type of Bluetooth connection. The most common are the Headset (HSP) and Handsfree (HFP) profiles that enable the device to connect to a wireless headset or handsfree. Some other profiles are OBEX (OBject EXchange) which allows transfer of files, contacts and events; A2DP, which adds support for streaming of stereo sound and AVRC, which allows remote control of playback.

  GLOSSARY Global Positioning System was developed by the United States' Department of Defense. It uses between 24 and 32 Medium Earth Orbit satellites that transmit precise microwave signals. This enables GPS receivers to determine their current location, time and velocity. The GPS satellites are maintained by the United States Air Force. Additional countries with there own satellite positioning systems are: • Russia - GLONASS (Global Navigation Satellite System) • European Union - Galileo (Global Navigation Satellite System) • China - BeiDou Navigation Satellite System • Japan - QZSS (Quasi-Zenith Satellite System) GPS is often used by civilians as a navigation system. On the ground, any GPS receiver contains a computer that "triangulates" its own position by getting bearings from at least three satellites. The result is provided in the form of a geographic position - longitude and latitude - to, for most receivers, within an accuracy of 10 to 100 meters. Software appli...

  GLOSSARY NFC is a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology that enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 cm distance. NFC is an upgrade of the existing proximity card standard (RFID) that combines the interface of a smartcard and a reader into a single device. It allows users to seamlessly share content between digital devices, pay bills wirelessly or even use their cellphone as an electronic traveling ticket on existing contactless infrastructure already in use for public transportation. The significant advantage of NFC over Bluetooth is the shorter set-up time. Instead of performing manual configurations to identify Bluetooth devices, the connection between two NFC devices is established at once (under a 1/10 second). Due to its shorter range, NFC provides a higher degree of security than Bluetooth and makes NFC suitable for crowded areas where correlating a signal with its transmitting physical device (and by extension, its user) might o...

GLOSSARY The built-in FM radio tuner is now considered a basic feature. It allows the user to listen to most of the live-broadcasted FM radio stations. Almost all phones with FM radio tuner require a wired headset to be connected to the unit as it’s used as an antenna. Most FM radio tuners can receive basic radio station info over RDS. The use of FM radio does not interfere with the network carrier and it’s free. Nokia enhance their FM radio interfaces with the Visual Radio enhancement that adds visuals and text as an additional info layer to normal radio broadcasts. A presentation of graphics and text, synchronized to the audio programming, gets downloaded to the phone over a data connection; the FM transmission chain is unaffected by the addition of Visual Radio. Here's the type of content that Visual Radio can offer: Information on the song and artist currently playing on air View images related to presenters or news stories A weather map during the weather broadcast News, weath...

  GLOSSARY USB is a standard for a wired connection between two electronic devices, including a mobile phone and a desktop computer. The connection is made by a cable that has a connector at either end. One end, the one that plugs into the computer, is the same across all USB cables while the one that plugs into the mobile device can be of various types such as miniUSB, microUSB or a proprietary connector. USB version 1.1 provides maximum speeds of up to 1.5 MB/s while the current version 2.0 is about 40 times faster. The versions are backwards compatible and the speed is limited by the slower device. Transferring data may require drivers to be installed on the desktop computer but some phones offer "mass storage" mode which means they appear as thumb drives to the computer and no special drivers are needed. In addition to their data transferring application, USB cables also carry an electric charge that can be used to power peripherals (such as USB mice or keyboards), and ma...

  GLOSSARY Smartphones today come with a wealth of sensors to facilitate a better user experience, provide apps with enhanced information about the world around the phone and provide robust and increased battery life. Proximity Sensor Detects when an object is near to the phone. Most commonly used to sense when a phone is held up to the users ear to turn off the display. This saves both battery life and prevents accidental screen touches. Accelerometer and gyroscope Accelerometers in mobile phones are used to detect the orientation of the phone. The gyroscope, or gyro for short, adds an additional dimension to the information supplied by the accelerometer by tracking rotation or twist. An accelerometer measures linear acceleration of movement, while a gyro on the other hand measures the angular rotational velocity. Both sensors measure rate of change; they just measure the rate of change for different things. In practice, that means that an accelerometer will measure the directiona...

  GLOSSARY Cellphones of the past came equipped with rechargeable nickel-based batteries with (Ni-Cd and NiMH). In the past few years, however, most rechargeable batteries used in phones are Lithium-based. They are either Lithium-ion (Li-Ion) and Lithium Polymer (Li-Po). The fundamental difference between a polymer lithium-ion battery and a liquid lithium-ion battery is that the electrolytes used in the two are different. Lithium-ion batteries have high energy density, so they hold more charge per volume but lose charge with aging even when not used. Li-Polymer has a lower energy density battery, but they are thinner, lighter, safer, and retain charge better as their age. Lithium polymer batteries are more advanced and significantly more expensive than Lithium-ion to manufacture so neither is definitively better than the other. Manufactures usually decide which type of battery is better suited for the the particular device design.

  GLOSSARY These are all the known phone model names this device currently goes under. You can use the phone model name listed by your retailer of choice to make sure you are seeing the correct phone. If there are any differences among the different model names, we'll usually be showing them as tabbed versions at the top.

  GLOSSARY The  price  we show in our Phone Specifications page is for reference information only which is useful for comparison purposes. This price is often the initial launch price of the phone and doesn't take into account any 'offers' or carrier subsidies. Mobile phone prices are dynamic and change every day. We simply can't monitor the prices of the thousands of models in our database, by country, on a daily basis. As a guide, if you want to know the exact price of a phone, please go to the websites listed in the  Check Price  option on the left-hand side of the Phone Specifications page.

 The pricing published on this page is meant to be used for general information only. While we monitor prices regularly, the ones listed above might be outdated. We also cannot guarantee these are the lowest prices possible so shopping around is always a good idea. If you decide to make a purchase, make sure you review the listing carefully so that the hardware configuration, the item condition, and its price all match what you expect. Check the warranty coverage for your country and be aware of any potential extra charges like sales tax and shipping or customs fees. We provide the links for price comparison purposes but as Associates to Amazon and the other stores linked above, we may get a commission from any qualifying purchases you make because we have referred you to the store. The affiliate programs GSMArena participates in are completely independent of our editorial product review process and our editors do not benefit from picking out specific deals.

GLOSSARY A way or organizing different types of data in the phone's memory. Also referred to as Shared memory. Dynamic memory means that all types of data are stored in the same memory (there is no separate memory for photos, ringtones etc.). An advantage of dynamic memory over partitioned memory is that it is more flexible - with partitioned memory, you can fill up the photo memory for example and you won't be able to take any more photos even if other types of memory are free.

GLOSSARY A special slot for inserting a memory card. Memory cards allow you to expand the phone's built-in memory (or in the past these slots have been used to add some missing features such as Wi-Fi connectivity). Memory cards have different capacities and are used to store and transfer files between compatible devices. There are several types of memory cards. The most popular and frequently used by mobile phone manufacturers is microSD; however, up until recently Sony Ericsson exclusively used the Memory Stick Micro (M2) card type developed by Sony. Memory card slots can have various supported memory card capacities. Depending on the device, card slots can support capacities of up to 512GB or even the yet unavailable 2TB. As manufacturers rarely test their products for compatibility with newer and larger cards that come out after a specific handset is out on the market, whenever it is possible, we try to verify that larger capacity cards run on older phones. When we confirm that ...

GLOSSARY CPU (Central Processing Unit) - otherwise known as a processor - is an electronic circuit that can execute computer programs. Both the miniaturization and standardization of CPUs have increased their presence far beyond the limited application of dedicated computing machines. Modern microprocessors appear in everything from automobiles to mobile phones. The clock rate is one of the main characteristics of the CPU when performance is concerned. Clock rate is the fundamental rate in cycles per second (measured in hertz, kilohertz, megahertz or gigahertz) for the frequency of the clock in any synchronous circuit. A single clock cycle (typically shorter than a nanosecond in modern non-embedded microprocessors) toggles between a logical zero and a logical one state. With any particular CPU, replacing the crystal with another crystal that oscillates with twice the frequency will generally make the CPU run with twice the performance. It will also make the CPU produce roughly twice th...

GLOSSARY The GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is a specialized circuit designed to accelerate the image output in a frame buffer intended for output to a display. GPUs are very efficient at manipulating computer graphics and are generally more effective than general-purpose CPUs for algorithms where processing of large blocks of data is done in parallel. Modern smartphones are equipped with advanced embedded chipsets that can do many different tasks depending on their programming. GPUs are an essential part of those chipsets and as mobile games are pushing the boundaries of their capabilities, the GPU performance is becoming increasingly important.