The
Razer Phone is not a good smartphone. Well, not a good $700 smartphone, at
least. On paper, it competes with other Android flagships: it has a fast
Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, 8GB of RAM, a dual camera system, a
high-resolution display, super loud stereo speakers, and so on. But in
practice, it’s a big, clumsy phone with a terrible camera and only average
battery life, despite its enormous battery capacity. On top of that, it lacks
both water resistance and a headphone jack; the former a table stakes feature
for phones at this price point, the latter a puzzling omission given the sheer
size of the Razer Phone.
So
why should you care? For one reason: the Razer Phone is the first smartphone
with a super high refresh display. It has basically the same display technology
found in Apple’s iPad
Pro 10.5 that enables incredibly smooth interactions and
scrolling. It is a glimpse at a future when all smartphones have this kind of
screen refresh technology.
High
screen refresh rates are most commonly desired by gamers on desktop PCs, as
they afford smoother gameplay and shorter reaction times for fast-action games.
On a mobile device, a high refresh rate makes your interactions silky, so
scrolling through your inbox or Twitter feed doesn’t look stuttery or jumpy.
The result is an interface that tracks your finger’s touch closer than ever and
never stutters or skips. It’s hard to convey how much different it feels
compared to a standard smartphone’s interface without just demonstrating it in
person, but it feels much closer to direct manipulation of elements on the
screen than any other phone. The difference between a high refresh screen and a
standard one is as noticeable as the jump from the iPhone 3GS’ screen to the
iPhone 4’s Retina Display.
Most
mobile device displays run at a 60Hz refresh rate, which lets them redraw the
content on the screen up to 60 times per second. In comparison, the Razer
Phone’s default refresh rate is 90Hz and can be set to 120Hz in settings for
even smoother interactions (at the cost of battery life). The Razer can do this
thanks to a few factors, partly because of its high-end internals that lots of
other Android phones share but also thanks to a custom display controller it
developed to handle the high refresh rate.
Almost
every Android app (with the exception of games, which I’ll get into in a bit)
benefits from this higher refresh rate, and there’s no work to be done on the
app developer’s part to enable it. The Razer can dynamically adjust its refresh
from as low as 20Hz all the way up to a full 120Hz depending on what the phone
is doing. If you’re just reading a static page on the screen, the refresh will
scale down to save power, but as soon as your finger touches the display, it
will ramp up to provide those smooth interactions. Likewise, if you’re watching
a movie that’s filmed at 24 frames per second, the Razer will set its refresh
rate to match, so you don’t get the “soap opera” effect commonly seen on TVs
that use 120Hz rates.
Games
are a little more complicated, as developers typically target a specific
refresh rate and “lock” the game to it. If a game has been locked to 60Hz, it
will stutter and drop a lot of frames if it’s played at 90 or 120Hz. But if the
developer doesn’t lock the game to 60Hz, it can take full advantage of the
Razer’s special display tech. Currently, there are about three dozen games that
support 120Hz on the Razer Phone, and three of them (Gear.Club,Titanfall
Assault, and World of Tanks) are preinstalled on the device out of
the box. All three of those games run silky smooth and make full use of the
Razer Phone’s unique technology.
Despite
the immediate benefits a high refresh display brings, this first implementation
by Razer comes with some big compromises. The panel in the Razer Phone is a
Sharp IGZO LCD, because the display controller that enables 120Hz doesn’t yet
work with OLED screens. The result is a screen that’s not as punchy or vibrant
as many other phones, and it doesn’t get nearly as bright. The Razer Phone is
very difficult to use outdoors because it’s screen is barely visible;
meanwhile, every other phone I’ve tested in the past year, even those with LCD
displays, such as the HTC U11, works outside without any issue.
But
the Razer Phone does provide some exciting prospects, and it will be very
interesting to see this kind of high refresh display technology in phones that
make fewer compromises to get it. If that happens, then the future of
smartphones is going to be pretty smooth.
0 Comments