Smartphones vs Laptops

So, whom do you favor?? Smartphones or Laptops??

This one may look like something right out of the blue - but it's actually been a long time coming. It's not about smartphones and tablets making more and more sense than laptops on a long commute or a trip. It's not about just web browsing, chatting and watching videos. Smartphones are increasingly able to match the processing power of laptops - and maybe the time isn't far away when they'll go after them in terms of productivity too.

It's easier and cheaper to make better, faster chipsets the size that goes into a laptop. It's easier and cheaper too to cool those better and faster chipsets at that size too. So, why is it that smartphone chipsets have been getting better faster than those for laptops?

Reasons may vary why smartphones have been pushing laptops into a corner, but two of them stand out: human nature and profitability. Mobile phones are darn good at making money. Samsung, for example, is making more money off mobile phones than the entire home appliance division (TVs, washing machines, the lot). Well, money's in smartphones, and R&D is where the money is.

So, there we go. A smartphone and a laptop will compete against each other in different tasks but the point of the exercise is not to declare a winner. Far from it. We'll try instead to look at how the two species have evolved and what kind of productivity you can get out of each size.

We'll be trying to get the big picture but, of course, a story is only as good as its characters. It seems there's little to worry about on that end. Let's just say we could've done a lot worse in terms of the cast. Defending the honor of smartphones is the Samsung Galaxy S4 - the pinnacle of mobile phone evolution right now. In the opposing corner stands the Lenovo Yoga 13.3" ultra-book. We chose it because of its excellent specs and really cool rotating screen. Sorry touchscreen.

The early days

Before we go on with the testing and see just how smartphones are catching up with notebooks, a bit of history is due. We promise, we'll keep it short and interesting for you.

The 1970s saw the birth of both mobile phones and laptops. IBM had the first commercially available notebook in 1973, less than aptly called SCAMP (Special Computer APL Machine Portable). As you would imagine, it had the weight - but nor the firepower - of a tank.

Mobile phones didn't quite start on the right foot either. The first glimpse of a smartphone was born in the early 1970s, buck back then it was just a patent. The device imagined by Theodore Paraskevakos would help you easily pay utility bills via a bank transfer. When it wasn't doing this, it could also do data processing and visualize stuff on its display.

The IBM Simon Personal Communicator

The cool idea became reality nearly two decades later, in 1992, when IBM (again) developed a prototype cellular phone with PDA features. Dubbed the IBM Simon Personal Communicator, it wasn't able to hit retail until 1994. It weighed half a kilo and carried a price tag of $1099.

Two years down the road Nokia enjoyed an unseen success with the introduction of the 9000. Slightly lighter than the IBM Simon, the Nokia clamshell sported a QWERTY keyboard and a big 640×200 pixel display (which was pretty high resolution at the time). As people started embracing the smartphone as a handy mobile tool, which could do more than mere phone calls and text messages, mobile phone manufacturers started to get serious about the product, investing in platform and hardware R&D.

Custom and proprietary software was in the heart of each and every smartphone back in the day, but many companies began to understand that this isn't going to end up well - a standardized mobile operating system was needed that could run on a myriad of the devices. This way companies could focus their effort on a single piece of software and not on one for each new smartphone.

At that point laptops had a huge advantage in all important areas - processing power, available software, and in turn sales. The gap was measured in tens of times and it was getting bigger by the day, as that industry was were all the money were going.

Then more capable platforms were born the momentum started to swing. Symbian, BlackBerry, Palm, and Windows Phone came to show the way. At that point they were trying to emulate the laptop experience and used Windows as their main inspiration for adding new features.

And that could never work out too well as at the time smartphones had so limited processing power that they could never quite measure up to the bigger devices. By the time when the first dual-core laptop came into existence, smartphones were still at 100MHz single-cores - optimizations or not that's too huge a difference to overcome. The app availability was also pretty limited as there wasn't a good centralized repository and besides few were really willing to pay for something that runs on a phone.

Then Apple took the stage and things went mental. The iPhone showed that smartphones don't need to try and emulate laptops - they should play to their own strengths instead. After enjoying the comfort of more precise input through mice and keyboards for ages, laptop owners finally had their own reasons to feel jealous - the cool gesture navigation, the nice transition effect and the eye-candy a platform not obsessed with features could offer started the touchscreen craze.

Then there came the App Store and suddenly mobile apps were all the rage. Developers who previously couldn't care less about smartphones were now making them their primary revenue streams, giving laptop and desktop platforms the cold shoulder.

Then the chipsets started to evolve at an unbelievable rate. Less than six years after the first iPhone was launched, we have smartphones with chipsets that have 30 times its processing prowess. Take that Moore's law!

As smartphone vendors got more oomph to work with, they started to build up a feature set that is now pretty close to that of laptops. The strong foundation of platforms that are designed from the ground up for touchscreen smartphones, combined with the lack of obligation to support legacy hardware and software (since people change smartphones way more often than laptops) yielded amazing results.

Don't get us wrong, laptops too were evolving - getting thinner, lighter and various in screen sizes. It's just that they were obviously caught off guard by the rapid progress their pocket able friends achieved. Tables have turned and now it's laptops that look to smartphones for inspiration - just look at Windows 8.

According to reports by IDC, a reputable market research and analysis company, in the first quarter of 2013 alone smartphone sales amounted to over 216 million units. An impressive figure, which incidentally also marks the first time smartphones out-shipped feature phones, at 202 million. This rounds up to a total of 418 million mobile phones sold in just a quarter. And not one of high consumer activity at that.

On the notebook market things aren't as rosy. In fact, sales have been steadily declining, taking a 14% year-on-year dip to 76.2 million units in Q1 2013. In fact, this is the biggest recorded drop since IDC started watching the market.

The company's analysts can see the gap between mobile phones and laptops widening with an expected 919 million smartphones sold in 2013, against around 350 million laptops and personal computers.

Screen comparison

One of the areas to benefit the most from the turbo-powered smartphone evolution lately is undoubtedly display quality. While the the early day smartphones had screens of similar quality to those of their laptop peers, now the two are usually miles apart.

It's telling that at this moment there are probably more 1080p smartphones in the market than there are laptops (not counting the huge 17+ inch work stations). Smartphones have also been enjoying the unrivaled contrast and punchy colors of AMOLED screens for a while now, while laptops are still waiting on the sidelines.

So even though the Lenovo Yoga 13's IPS capacitive touchscreen of 1600x900 is pretty good for a laptop, it's no match for the 441 ppi AMOLED of the Galaxy S4 or the 469 Super LCD3 of the HTC One. Of course the Yoga trumps them both with its sheer size, but its image quality is simply no match for those beasts.

Neither the contrast, nor the viewing angles or the 133ppi of the Yoga can hold a candle to what are certainly the two best screens in the smartphone market. There's just none of that high-end vibe and the paper-like look to be found in the laptop world at that point.

Of course we should keep in mind that the user interface of the Windows 8 OS doesn't scale very nicely at densities beyond that of the Yoga, so it's not all about investing more money in the hardware here. 1080p on a 13" Windows machine is okay, when you're in Modern UI or the apps designed specifically for it, but it can be a problem for productive tasks in Desktop mode. Once again it's the legacy software that's holding the laptops back.

A cool feat of the Samsung Galaxy S4 screen is that even if you are not a fan of the oversaturated look of AMOLEDs, you have the option to tune the saturation down for a natural look and enjoy the best of both worlds. There's a dedicated Adobe RGB setting that sees to it. Laptops are no strangers to color profiles but their screens more often than not simply lack the kind of quality hardware to be able to perform well in both scenarios.

We ran our traditional contrast ratio test on the Lenovo Yoga 13 and here are the results.

Display test	50% brightness			100% brightness
	Black, cd/m2	White, cd/m2	Contrast ratio	Black, cd/m2	White, cd/m2	Contrast ratio
Samsung I9505 Galaxy S4	0	201	∞	0	404	∞
HTC One	0.13	205	1580	0.42	647	1541
Lenovo Yoga 13	-			0.32	352	1092

There's also the matter of sunlight legibility, where the smartphones score another point. The Galaxy S4 does greatly in bright sunlight and HTC One is not half bad either. The Yoga is good for the ultra-book class, but can't quite match the low reflectivity of those two and its inferior brightness certainly doesn't help either. 

Performance

In general, laptops and smartphones have very different platforms and hardware, so evaluating their performance can be a bit tricky. Still we found a few cross-platform benchmarks that should give us a good idea of their relative standing.

As luck would have it the first two of those coincide with the most use case for both personal computers and smartphones - web browsing.

First is Sun Spider, which measures JavaScript performance. The Lenovo Yoga 13 running Internet Explorer 10 monstered the Galaxy S4 scoring much better here, although we have to mention that JavaScript is single-threaded, which means the two extra cores of the Samsung flagship don't help it at all here.

Sun Spider

Lower is better

• Lenovo Yoga 13 163
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)   804
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)   810

Moving on to Browser Mark 2, which is a suite of tests including JavaScript and HTML5-rendering. Here, the gap between the Yoga 13 and Galaxy S4 was much smaller to the point of being hard to notice in real life.

Browser Mark 2

Higher is better

• Lenovo Yoga 13 3410
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa) 2710
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600) 2580

Of course speed isn't everything when it comes to web browsing as things like a larger screen and full Flash support still count in favor of the Yoga. Still, that's hardly the point here.

Lastly, we ran Geek Bench 2, which is a cross-platform benchmark, which allows us to compare the overall Galaxy Samsung Galaxy S4 performance (CPU, GPU and memory) against the Lenovo Yoga 13. The powerful Intel Core i5 naturally came out on top here, but the difference is less than two-fold.

Geek bench 2
Higher is better

• Lenovo Yoga 13 5001
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa) 3324
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600) 3227

The ultra-book beat the smartphone in all tests and we wouldn't expect anything less, but the margin of its victory is way smaller than we though. The JavaScript test aside (which favors per-core performance over number of cores and where devices are often to perform by their manufacturers), the other two produced a difference of under two times and we'd certainly call that a win for the smartphone camp. 

Battery life

Some less than encouraging stats there, and we are now to see to what extent has the gap been closed. Handheld chip makers have caught up and even surpassed laptops in terms of number of CPU cores and occasionally even clock speed.

The Lenovo Yoga 13 is powered by a 2.6GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor of the Ivy Bridge variety, while the Galaxy S4 we're basing this comparison on features either a 1.6GHz octa-core CPU or a quartet of Krait 300 cores running at up to 1.9GHz in the Snapdragon 600 chipset.

It's not a fair fight whichever way you look at it, due to the major architectural differences between Intel and ARM. They both have differing instruction sets, cache methods, memory management and bandwidth, among other things.

Having said that, both platforms have something in common - video playback and web browsing. As such, we've let them deal with one another in our battery test to see just how efficiently each one manages its resources.

We need to make a necessary disclaimer that we set the screen of both devices to about 150lm to have them on equal footing.

Additionally, since Windows 8 offers different power management setups, we've set the Lenovo ultra-book on High performance to let it unleash its full potential and manage the available CPU and GPU resources itself.

In terms of web browsing, the Galaxy S4 rather predictably beat the Lenovo Yoga 13, by over 2 hours. The Galaxy S4 finished the test in 7 hours and 24 minutes of continuous web browsing, whereas the Yoga managed 5 hours and 7 minutes.

Here, the smaller screen and less powerful, but more efficient CPU take the credit. Had we compared the Yoga ultra-book with one of the Web browsing battery test champions (HTC One), the difference in score would've been close to double.

Web browsing

Higher is better

• Lenovo Yoga 13 5:07
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600) 7:01

In the video component of our traditional battery test, we play a movie at SD quality. This is so that we can give equal chance to low- and mid-range devices against the premium offerings on the smartphone market.

But since this isn't a usual test, we chose to play a more demanding 720p .MKV file with x264 encoding. As you can see in the results below, the Galaxy S4 posts more than double the time of the Yoga 13, at nearly 9 hours of continuous 720p video playback (8:56h to be exact).

The Lenovo Yoga on the other hand did rather poorly in comparison getting the measly 3:52 hours.

720p video playback

Higher is better

• Lenovo Yoga 13 3:52
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600) 8:56

So as far as consuming content on the go is concerned, smartphones have an advantage and a pretty big one at that. It has always been this way and that's hardly surprising, but there's a change in the big picture you should consider. While previously laptops could take consolation in the fact that they could at least support more content (video codes, more complex web pages etc.), devices like the Samsung Galaxy S4 have eradicated much of that advantage.

And don't get fooled to think that the endurance difference is entirely down to the difference in screen sizes. After all laptops have a lot more room to fit larger batteries and, in this case at least, they don't even have as many pixels to worry about.

Loudspeaker

We also ran our traditional loudspeaker test on the Yoga 13 for a good measure. It scored a below average result, which is strange considering that laptops have enough space to house much larger speakers than those found on smartphones. 

However, it's very important to note that the Lenovo offers far clearer sound, which is going to be far more important to many. 

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overall score
Lenovo Yoga 13	64.2	61.7	62.3	Below average
Samsung I9505 Galaxy S4	70.6	66.2	77.3	Good

Conclusion
 

So, evolution can be cruel. But there's nothing wrong with how laptops have been handling it. They have been getting better as fast as ever, if not even faster recently. It's the smartphone revolution and the money it's making that changed the scene.

Phones are far easier to carry around and, once technology evolved enough to let them do more than calling, they were always likely to get more attention. They have obviously been busy closing in on laptops and, with HDMI and wireless connectivity constantly evolving, are becoming more and more of perfectly good alternatives of laptops as the media player bit in a home theater setup. Also, with Bluetooth and USB OTG, smartphones can have the full set of peripherals to match laptops: keyboards, mice, and the lot. 

Still we can't see that gap disappearing altogether - the screen size, a proper keyboard and the productivity of desktop software can't be compensated for just yet.

While it might seem that the smartphones and tablets are hurting laptop sales, we actually believe that at this point the two products are doing more of completing each other than actually competing. Even tablets are still unable to properly replace a laptop for even the most casual users, but at this rate we can't really say that day won't come.

Software is the tricky bit, and it goes both ways. Desktop software is still way ahead in terms of flexibility or real productivity: it will be a while before writers, accountants, architects, designers, software developers, photographers will be able to their job on a phone or tablet. Maybe never. On the other hand, laptops are being dragged down by the weight of an OS and apps invented years ago (redesigns and updates cannot quite hide that fact) and software that’s been designed with a one-size-fit-all mentality.

Like chipset design, software development is favoring smartphones over desktop Operating Systems. There’s probably more profit in a simple touch-based game for handheld than the most impressively elaborate PC game that takes a monster GPU to run and a multiple-screen setup to appreciate.

And it's not the size, the touchscreen or the convenience, backed by the quickly advancing technology that will continue to fuel the smartphones' drive forward. What we're watching evolve here is the very concept of personal.

 Ironically, the evolution started with the personal computer, and laptops were nothing short of a quantum leap. But it just doesn't get any more personal than something you can carry with you at all times and hold in hand.