But I wish we'd stop saying "memory" when we mean "storage" ... seeing "Memory" and "RAM" next to each other is a bit confusing, since they're the same thing.
I did this type of product comparison chart for Laptops, Solid State Drives, Flash Drives and MP3 Players in the past. Dubbed them "Tourist map of Laptops" etc. The tourist thing caused some confusion, so I simply went with "comparison chart" this time.
If you have suggestions for more features, let me know. Also if you have suggestions which product category to chart next. Either here on HN or on my blog: http://www.gibney.de/the_smartphone_comparison_chart
Some filter suggestions: camera resolution, year released, battery life, and OS (and version). I don't know where you're getting the info from, but these could all be pulled from gsmarena.
It seems like there are a lot fewer of us keyboard zealots these days. I've been hoping to see an update to my now 4-year-old HTC Desire Z. Physical keyboard, removable storage, and swappable SD cards are great - I really don't want to give any of those up.
I resigned myself to getting a new Nexus device since so few apps are coming out for Android 2.3 anymore, but then they came out with that 6" monster... I really have no idea what phone to upgrade to. Nobody makes a phone I want anymore.
It is an N900 chassis (inc keyboard) with a GTA04 motherboard plus some cool anti-spying features to isolate the LTE modem (which of course runs a proprietary OS).
Lame! No, I definitely thought the Moto series was one of the "good ones" getting timely updates, so I'm bummed to hear that. Is the Nexus series literally the only one that wins points in this category?
Apparently! I was extremely disappointed, got this "unlocked international" phone but it's an AT&T version that has a locked bootloader, I was incredibly blown because I can't even mess around with the internals. I think the Nexus models and the newest Moto phones are the only ones with L so far. Grr...
One thing I noticed -- the Nexus 6 actually comes in either 32GB or 64GB, but when I search based on memory/storage or on price, only the 32GB shows up. This is probably happening for other models with multiple variations. (Also, I think the price you've listed for it is just wrong -- likely due to limited supply on Amazon)
Nice work. It makes it far too easy to see that there's still no sensible alternative to my S4 mini Duos.
I'm on the lookout for a replacement for my Lenovo X230, which I got specifically because it can take 16GB RAM and has a <13" screen. It would be very helpful if the RAM slider for laptops was max RAM that they can take rather than min RAM from factory.
Looks nice. Might I recommend that you look into adding easing to your animations. It looks like you're using simple linear interpolation to move the points from place to place. If you use cubic easing they'll accelerate then decelerate, it looks a lot more natural that way. Linear interpolation looks robotic.
The OnePlus One is $349 for the 64 GB model right now. $299 for 16 GB. I was just on their website regretting my Moto X (2014) purchase.
Edit: I should mention that I love my Moto X, especially with Android L - But the OnePlus One comes with Cyanogen, +1 GB of RAM, double the storage, much bigger battery, probably a better back camera, seemingly better screen/microphones, definitely better front camera... For almost $100 less. Ouch.
Battery - that's the killer feature. I got the Huawei Mate 2, which is a cheap plastic build with a near-useless ROM (tons of anti-features), no upgrades (well now they claim Lollipop sometime next year), no open source for Cyanogen.
But the 4AH battery cannot be beat. I never worry about charging. If I'm tired when I go to bed, I just let my phone fall wherever. The only time it discharged was when I didn't charge it two nights in a row.
That kind of freedom of not constantly dealing with power, it's pretty great. Meanwhile, every other phone manufacturer focuses on getting through the day without charging, as if that's some amazing piece of usability.
It also shows how easy it is to make a fantastic phone. Put some parts together, and ship it. Huawei would have a top-class phone if they hadn't run their crap version of Android. And offer a separate model if you want a non-junk camera.
I missed them so much I sold my Android phone and went back to an old-school nokia. These days I charge my phone once a week, or less, and I miss features far less than I expected to.
It has a great visual look, but I got really confuse when I start to adjust the filters on the left hand side. The phones icons started to jump to different spots on graph that does not seem to change.
Let me give you an example, as I changed the filter of the RAM from 1GB to 2GB, the icon Samsung Galaxy S5 G900F 4G LTE 16GB jumped over the icon for Samsung Galaxy S5 G900FD DUOS 4G LTE even though their specs exactly the same. When I saw that, I concluded that their screen sizes changed due to memory configuration as the x-axis of the graph is screen size. Yeah, I know it is a bad conclusion, but that what the graph says.
It would be interesting to be able to chart the results with different axis constraints. Maybe graphing a processor index vs. price. It could be useful for scaling if you could set the search filters from the chart, so maybe you could "zoom" into a cluster and then pivot to other constraints.
edit: I suggested customisable axes, but I was on mobile at the time and didn't see that capability. Still, there may still be something to adjusting the scaling to zoom, so I'll leave this comment here and suggest that on mobile the feature should be more discoverable.
This is such a great way to contrasting my younger self with my older self.
My younger self want's to adjust all those sliders.
My older self adjusted the screen DPI to 300 DPI, (where I can't see the pixels) and moved the weight slider from lighter to heavier until a phone showed up.
And all that showed was the iPhone.
I could care less about RAM, Sims, SD cards, memory, etc now. These aren't indicative of the experience. My younger self would have loved hunting down the right fit phone from the Android market. My older self? Nah. I'll go take some photos of my kids instead.
Would you consider adding one's selection filters to the navigation hash, so that I can reload the page (or follow a link and come back) without having to re-do all of my filtering selections?
Query strings should be more reliable, hashes can be lost for example when using an URL shortener. Also URLs should generally be kept to under ~2000 characters, so depending on how many filters you have you might want to take the preset approach.
Turn up the storage to 128 GB and come to the realisation that android users are expected to use memory cards if they want to store all their videos/photos/music.
That's if their phone has an SD card, of course. Lots of Android devices assume you'll use some kind of cloud storage for anything you can't fit in the phone's internal memory.
I keep the prices in sync with Amazon. If the phone is not available from Amazon directly - as is the case for the Nexus 5 - I resort to the list price. I could resort to the lowest price from the Amazon marketplace but I have to check first if that makes sense in all cases.
Some kind of age metric is often useful in a selector. For example, when was the phone first available on Amazon. Or what OS does it run. In a fast-moving market like phones, age is a dealbreaker. You might find just the right size, memory, price... but come to find out it is stuck at Android 2.3.
But I wish we'd stop saying "memory" when we mean "storage" ... seeing "Memory" and "RAM" next to each other is a bit confusing, since they're the same thing.