Laptop vs Smartphone

With the ongoing innovations and advancements in technology, it’s no surprise to anybody with any common sense that the void between laptops and smart phones closing, but then again, common sense isn’t so common nowadays. With that said, lets dive into the ongoing debate on whether you should purchase a midrange laptop or a flagship smartphone.

Portability

Most laptops and smartphones are designed to be used in the go however, this one must go to the smartphone. The compact nature of the common smartphone allows it to be taken as a daily essential, along with your wallet/purse, keys and most importantly cloths. Most mid-range laptops are easy to carry around without too much discomfort but the hassle of carrying a laptop bag everywhere you go just becomes inconvenient sometimes. It must also be noted that some high-end gaming laptops can almost be classified as desktops with their hardware and weight. There are trade-offs with power consumption and performance on more complicated tasks, but more on this later.

Cost and future proofing

Another big point of contention between both these devices is the cost associated with them. Most mid-range/budget gaming laptops are similarly priced to many of the recent flagship smartphones that are coming into the market. The ability to pay for my smartphone along with a monthly plan is alluring for many consumers like myself, with the added ability to change out my phone every few years to the most recent one. For this reason, I would have to say that smartphones take the lead on this as well. Furthermore, smartphones are available for dirt cheap prices with touch screens and most of the essential features you would find in a regular phone. Laptops can be financed on weekly plans, but the lack of options for a replacement after they become outdated is one of the major downfalls.

Storage and RAM

The increasing storage capacities seen in smartphones have greatly seen to rival the storage capacities in laptops, however the ability to upgrade storage in laptops by adding a parallel hard drive, an SSD or a M.2 increases both storage capacity as well as transfer speeds in most cases. In my opinion, laptops would have to take this one. Micro SD cards can be added to smartphones nowadays and increase the storage up to 1TB- such as the addition of a 512GB micro SD card to the 512GB variant of the Samsung Galaxy Note 9; but the slower transfer speeds are a significant bottleneck to the stored data and would make it better off to just work on an external storage device.

Newer smartphones also come packed with a tonne of RAM, and it is not uncommon to see flagships come with four, six or even eight GB of RAM. These are comparative to mid-range laptops with eight GB of RAM. This is something that is barely noticeable in everyday task, and something that would be a tie between both devices, however the size of a smartphone allows it to better benefit from more RAM and allows more process to be run in a much smoother manner.

Batteries, Power Consumption and Performance

If you intend on lugging around an extra 2-3 pounds because of your power brick and cables, this may get uncomfortable if you are always on the go, yet the battery capacity for modern laptops is increasingly getting better and allows for more prolonged use for less labour-intensive tasks like browsing the internet or word processing. Smartphones on the other hand will bottleneck CPU functions in some circumstances to conserve battery life. Obviously, the battery in smartphones is smaller, but is optimized in a much better way to extend its life. In my experience in using the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, the battery was drained relatively quickly with everyday tasks combined with light gaming and watching video on the internet. If you want a more comprehensive review on the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, check out the review HERE. Unless you want to carry around a bulky power bank with your smartphone, I would stick with a laptop.

Performance would also go together with battery capacity as there is currently no standard way to accurate perform an apples-to-apples comparison with the performance and battery life of a device. Because of this, I would have to remain neutral on the performance of each device, relative to their battery capacities. However, the performance of both laptops and smartphones are respectable in each their own right. Again, solely based on the performance of each piece of tech, I would have to side with laptops on this one. The power consumption by laptops is also greater than smartphones but would theoretically cost more to run. The average laptop consumes 72 kWh when plugged in, compared to the average smartphone which consumes 2kWh. This gets bumped up when dealing with more beefy laptops that can be used for gaming or video editing.

Screen

Laptops obviously have an advantage here in terms of size, but when looking at screens from a holistic stand point and including factors such as higher screen resolution and overall build quality, I would recommend a smartphone over a laptop in most situations. The larger screen size is advantageous for more lengthy tasks such as word processing or coding, but for other daily tasks, such as watching videos, checking/replying to emails, scrolling through social media and portability, I would have to side with the smartphone.

Other details to consider

The tactile feel of the keys is one argument that is always brought up in debates. Although I do understand this view point, the future may be different, as seen when older generations of phones with buttons were phased out by touch screens. Furthermore, Apple’s newer lines of MacBooks have gone the route to stick a thin touch bar at the top of the keyboard and removing the entire top row of the keyboard. Both these factors may indicate how the keyboard itself maybe phasing out. As well as this, the advancements in auto correct and predictive texts allow people to type as fast, if not faster than the traditional keyboard method, hence giving even more reason to switch to the smartphone to jump ahead of the bandwagon.

Others may also complain that the lack of ports on a phone is what is holding back smartphones, but to that I would say; newer phones come with accessories such as micro USB to; type C, regular USB, HDMI and others to say the least.

Lastly, who browses their social media though their laptop? If you were to be using Snapchat, Instagram or something else, the shear convenience that is provided by using your phone is immeasurable.

Verdict

With most of the categories being clearly awarded to smartphones, I see no other reason to fully recommend buying a flagship smartphone over a midrange currently. This may also suggest why Razer and Asus are dabbling in the smartphone and laptop market and trying to integrate phones into laptops. Smartphones prevail over laptops in terms of portability, application variety, cost-effective, and capacitive screen quality.