Moblie phone specs

We come across a lot of specifications for a mobile phone that are rather confusing or abstract.
I here attempt to explain a few of them.

Battery:
Mobile phone batteries do not perform to the levels as specified by the manufacturers most of the time. This may be due to several factors.
-The battery has a definite expiry time. So older models have under performance then latter ones due to this.
-The specified talktime will be considering ideal situations. This varies on signal strength, local phone settings,bad charging and maintenance practices. We should never keep our battery in hot surroundings or charge it for extended periods.
-Every battery has a specified mAh. One ampere-hour is equal to the electric charge transferred by a steady current of one ampere for one hour. So a higher mAh means a higher battery performance.

Display:
The display can be described in two parameters.
1) Resolution
2) Physical size
3)Number of colors.

-The screen is generally available in resolution of 128x128, 176x220, 240x320(QVGA) among a large variety of others.
This represents the number of pixels a screen can display. The more pixels here, the more clarity the display will be of literally.
-The physical size means the length of the diagonal across the screen. This has little to do with clarity but effects the overall presentation of the screen. We should be sure that the above two parameters are balanced in a particular screen. The normal screen sizes vary widely depending on the mobile.
Eg: 2 inch, 1.8 inch etc.
-Number of colors means the color differentiating capability of each pixel. This consumes more battery but greatly enhances the quality of the display.
This is typically about 4k, 64k, 256k, 16M etc.

Camera:
A mobile phone camera cannot compete with a dedicated digital camera(as yet).
All the buzz about higher Megapixels is only a cosmic improvement most of the time.
The most important thing that separates mobile cameras from dedicated digital cam's is the sensor.
A digital cam is equipped with CCD sensors. these are very sensitive, relatively large and

relatively expensive. A mobile is equipped with a CMOS sensor which is less sensitive, cheap, small and less power hungry.
Apart from sensors, the lens used greatly improves the picture quality. Some mobiles are equipped with Carl-Ziess optics which offer a good image gathering capability but still the ones on digital cam's outperform the mobile ones.

The video option on a mobile cam is also a cosmic option. Most phones offer a basic QCIF resolution which is very un-viewable. A resolution of VGA quality will be minimum that would be viewable.
The refresh rate( FPS) of a recording must match the resolution. If not the video may become even worse due to increased sluggishness of the recording.

I hope you got a brief idea about the most important parameters we generally look at firt. If you have any specific doubts feel free to contact me.

Connectivity:
Most midrange phones come with a decent connectivity options.
This means our phones capability to access data services like WWW on our phone itself( Or as a Modem).
The basic connectivity option is GPRS. It stands for General Purpose Radio Service. It has different classes, which specify( over the air) the connection speed which typically will be around 32-64 kbps.
EDGE or EGPRS is another technology that provide enhanced speeds around 300kbps.
The 3G, which is yet to make a strong mark in India( other then BSNL 3G) provides still higher data rates. This makes possible high bandwidth applications lile videoconferencing, video streaming etc possible.
For short distance mobile to mobile communication, Bluetooth and IR serve the purpose.
For higher performance LAN level connections Wi-Fi and WI-Max come to play.
Java:
Java support is almost universally present mobiles. This means third party software's written Java ME can be used on the mobile.