The capabilities of the mobile smartphone in your pocket are truly stunning. No matter if you’re paying a premium or picking up a budget option, there’s some serious digital firepower in your hands.
To make all of this stand out – phonearena compared the power of today’s smartphones against vintage supercomputers:
‘In 1975, a supercomputer named Cray-1 came around. It was a capable and awesome-looking piece of machinery that “flew” at a rate of 80MHz. While generally used for scientific projects, such as simulating the interaction of fluids, one of these bad boys helped render the CGI for the first Tron movie, released in 1982. But a Cray-1’s raw computational power of 80 million floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) is laughable by today’s standards; the graphics unit inside the iPhone 5s produces about 76.8 GFLOPS – nearly a thousand times more. And surely, the iPhone can render 3D graphics looking better than Tron’s Lightcycle scene. On a related note, the Cray-2 supercomputer was released 10 years after the Cray-1 and was the world’s fastest supercomputer until 1990. But even with a performance of up to 1.9 GFLOPS, the liquid-cooled, 200-kilowatt machine still ranks behind the Apple iPhone, at least when it comes to GFLOPS ratings.’
And remember, they are being compared to the iPhone 5s – which is a few years behind the new iPhone 7 – the power of modern smartphones are staggering, especially when being compared to the powerful computers of old.
Your phone comes with advanced media technology – usually in the form of dual-lens cameras which are capable of professional SLR type zooms nowadays. Not only that but there are plenty of software options available. You can also stream TV and film! The modern phone is an all-in-one media solution. There’s an app for everything!
If you’ve got a eye for photography, there’s no better place to start than a smartphone. The lens is going to be decent and the editing software? Well, it’s pretty comprehensive no matter your choice of Apple or Android. Snapseed and iPhoto can get your snaps looking fancy with minimal effort. Make sure that you upload the pictures to cloud storage as they can fill up your phone quite quickly!
There are plenty of streaming options available for when you need to wind down and chill out with a marathon of your favourite TV show. Showbox is a great app for Android users; it’s got a lot of features, and the best thing is that it’s free of cost. Bonus!
Let’s not forget audio and video – your phone can double as an amazing voice recorder if you want to try your hand at podcasting, but the lens might even be capable of recording 4k video. Your next home video might be Oscar-worthy. Well, it won’t be but at least it will look good!
Your phone is an amazingly powerful device – find out what works best and apply it to your interests, its uses may surprise you.
