Do you really need the fluidity of 90/120 hz displays ?
3 min readAug 29, 2020
Good phones have gotten cheaper and cheap phones have gotten better. Its truly the era of mobile phone evolution that we all have been asking for. But after this evolution, phones are no more exciting as they have been in the past. You guessed it, every freaking phone, be it $1500 ultra premiums or $100 budget ones! All of them got vivid high resolution screens, hundreds of megapixels in cameras, thousands of mAh's in batteries. So what's there to differentiate the good, the bad and the ugly ?
# There's high refresh rate!
Although high refresh rate monitors have been there for desktops for so long that I'll have to search wikipedia for their history, they are like infants in smartphones. Although Apple is late to the game in the smartphone side, they were the first to implement 120hz displays in their Ipad pros. If you count them as mobile devices!
The first player that scored a goal in the high refrash rate game was Razer, the gaming oriented company that makes laptops, keyboards, mouses and yeah, other gaming stuff. Razer released their very creatively named phone "Razer Phone" in late 2017. And voila, it has a 120hz screen!
Holy shoot, it gave the people something that they didn't even know they wanted! The god level tech reviewers almost licked the sweet sweet 120hz display that they have always loved in their high end gaming monitors. The scrolling looked buttery smooth, the fingers felt gliding over the slippery 120hz like it were a penguin's belly on ice! Then the hype started.
# What on earth is refresh rate ?! And why should it be high !?
Okay, for our non technical friends who have more important things to do than to research the history of monitors, let me explain it.
So your screen, that you are reading this on, is changing its image at least 60 times a second. Even now, when your screen is showing just some constant text, it's not showing it constantly. Rather its showing an image of the texts 60 times a second. But it happens so quickly that your eyes can't see the jitters.
But you see the little changes in the image in some circumstances, like scrolling and gaming. when you are scrolling, you are moving a page upwards. So the content of the page doesn't change, only its position changes. So its much more easier to notice the choppiness in the screen while scrolling. The effect is much more pronounced in gaming. If you could see your opponent moving out a fraction of a second earlier, you could've got the headshot, I swear.
# So you need it then ?
Keeping the very non technical explanation out of the way, you ask me, so I need it then, right ?
Well, depends!
How come you have used a 60 hz phone all your life and never noticed the choppiness ? You didn't because it's actually not that choppy! It only is when you compare it with 90 or 120 hz.
When I first got my hands on a friend's Oneplus 7 pro that has a 90 hz amoled screen, I hardly noticed the differences. Then when I got back to my old 60 hz phone, I surely noticed it. It's like going from a Toyota to a Mercedes, the upgrades seem sweet but not so life changing. You notice the changes when you come back to Toyota from the Mercedes.
# Enough talking, just tell me do I need it or not ?
Okay, cool down, you don't need it in your daily life. If you are considering it for midrange or budget gaming, know that your phone's chipset and other internals won't be able to deliver those 90 or 120 frames for your display. Its gonna be more like 45 to 60 fps no matter how high refresh rate your display is. If you wanna get it for the scrolling smoothness only, I think camera, amoled screen, chipset or maybe more ram are the things to invest before scrolling smoothness.
# What if I'm the rich guy ?
Bro, go for it. If you can afford a $1000 phone with great internals, great camera, great battery, why miss out on refresh rate! You deserve to be smooth ;)