Gadgetory

we gadget fans are always on the quest for faster performance which makes sense because our daily interactions with our phones are usually pretty brief we want to minimize the amount of time we spend interacting with the phone so we can maximize the amount of time that we spend with our data and services lag is one of the more subjective points we can discuss but it's also one of the most frustrating reading through the comments on our reviews it would seem that pretty much every major flagship phone is both the lagus device ever made and also the most lag free device ever created it's kind of like pornography we can't always define it but we know when we see it so what is lag looking this up on Wikipedia we get an entry focused on online gaming lag is a noticeable delay between the actions of players and the reaction of the server this actually works for our conversation about smartphones a delay between action and response most of us have probably experienced a situation where we go to tap on something on our phone screens we don't get any noticeable reaction from the phone then when we go to tap again that's when the phone responds to the first command for the purposes of this video we'll call that lag and we can separate this from otherwise slow performance if it's taking a long time for an app to load on your phone but the phone is showing you that it reacted promptly to your input that's not really lag you just have a slow phone and this is the difference between the actual performance of a gadget and the perception of the performance of that gadget this is something Apple nailed on the original iPhone utilizing pretty animations to transition the user from the input command to the actual service they requested it might take the phone a long time to get that app running but at no point should the phone ever appear completely inert and today on a powerhouse phone like the galaxy s7 hitting the multitasking button produces a three-fold response first there's a little haptic pulse a little vibration to inform the user that the key press was registered then an animation pulls the screen away from what you were looking at previously and transitions you into a series of cards for the user to interact with we find a supremely frustrating to touch a button on our phones and see zero response lag is that unholy beast which makes us question whether our phone is performing poorly or if we just missed the command we intended to hit it's also why it's so hard to demonstrate lag consistently for our reviews our phones are constantly under differing amounts of load with different background processes or pulling information from online services thankfully it's a rare surprise to encounter a phone which lags consistently enough for us to catch it on camera high-end performance across the board is pretty smooth these days so might we ever have a truly lag free phone in two words probably not in a perfect world where one monolithic company could have complete control over the hardware the software and anticipate every single consumer interaction with that gadget then we might see a device which consistently and instantly responds to every single customer command our phones are pretty complicated little devices to oversimplify let's take Android for example we have a layer of hardware which communicates with a kernel in this case Linux and on top of that kernel runs an Android runtime environment and then on top of that environment are all of the apps and services that consumers can use moving information through that hierarchy takes time sometimes that time is measured in individual processor cycles and sometimes there's a quarter second delay before your navigation app pulls up the information that you requested on a point of interest since we don't live in that boring perfect world we'll just have to contend with the occasional stutter skip or that moment of waiting as our phones process insane amounts of information utilizing billions of dollars of communications infrastructure also we can bask in the glory of watching cat videos online so let's have a little fun down in the comments what the lajiye Steve I see you've ever used phones tablets mp3 players they're all fair game as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more fun informative videos like these and hit that thumbs up button for a little extra positive reinforcement for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag now you can chat me up on Twitter and Instagram as some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next video it's like being in a conversation with someone and you finish your point the other person just staring at you without any kind of reaction on their face