Samsung Galaxy-S3-Mini-Design-White €109.99 O2 prepay

bromley52

http://www.o2online.ie/shop/view/product/ql_catalog/catdevice/Samsung-Galaxy-S3-Mini-Design-White

This is currently €109.99 on O2 prepay, possibly €88 when using the 20% off priority moments code.

Still decent enough phone.

You can get the mini VE for the same price as well.

Harold Finchs Machine

Sister has one.

You'd want a quad core now if an average user.

Things just keep getting more and more power hungry.

TempAc

bromley52 wrote: »

This is currently €109.99 on O2 prepay, possibly €88 when using the 20% off priority moments code.

Still decent enough phone.

You can get the mini VE for the same price as well.

The mini VE is actually better I think.

The other thing is that the moto e is a far better phone for the same money, as long as you're not a selfie fanatic. The S3 mini falls somewhere between a galaxy s1 and a galaxy s2 spec wise.

The other problem is the always mentioned existence of the Moto G for just a bit more. I'm honestly surprised someone else hasn't posted it yet.

TempAc

Harold Finchs Machine wrote: »

Sister has one.

You'd want a quad core now if an average user.

Things just keep getting more and more power hungry.

This is complete nonsense. More cores don't necccesserily mean more power. There are too many other variables. In fact more cores a lot of the time actually only work for a short period of time because they hit their thermal ceiling and just get throttled down. In 8 core phones they generally only have 4 cores max working at a time. The phone that generally benchmarks the highest actually only has two cores.

whineflu

TempAc wrote: »

This is complete nonsense. More cores don't necccesserily mean more power. There are too many other variables. In fact more cores a lot of the time actually only work for a short period of time because they hit their thermal ceiling and just get throttled down. In 8 core phones they generally only have 4 cores max working at a time. The phone that generally benchmarks the highest actually only has two cores.

Had to pipe in here.
More CPU cores means more processing power. Full stop.
To take advantage of these cores requires an application to be written to use the extra cores and multi threaded programming is HARD so most apps aren't written this way. A dual core can perform better in a benchmark. It depends what the benchmark is measuring.
The reason a phone with 8 cores only uses 4 at a time is because the hardware was designed to use a lower powered quad core (e.g an A9 reference design) for normal tasks and ramp up to the higher powered quadcore (A15) when needed.

Digital Society

whineflu wrote: »

Had to pipe in here.
More CPU cores means more processing power. Full stop.

Not True.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A8X

So your saying any Quad Core is more powerful than the A8X?

Pablo1802

http://versus.com/en/qualcomm-snapdragon-801-msm8974ac-v3-vs-apple-a8x

whineflu

Digital Society wrote: »

Not True.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A8X

So your saying any Quad Core is more powerful than the A8X?

Wow!!! Do you really think I'm saying that or are you trolling?
I'm saying that a quad core where each core is clocked at X MHz is twice as "powerful" as a Dual Core where each core is clocked at X MHz.
In the real world dual core designs normally feature higher clock speeds than quad cores. For a single application where pure speed is paramount e.g. gaming a dual core with a higher clock speed is preferable. When running numerous applications both background and foreground a quad core will have to do less context switching.
"Harold Finch's Machine's" statement above was that a quad core was preferable for "the average user". That is debatable depending on the particular SOCs you are talking about... but it's not "complete nonsense".

beauf

Hard to compare as its not just about the number of cores and speed. There also which specific CPU design it is, some are more powerful than others, and some phones have different graphic processors GPU in addition to their CPU. Which can make a big difference in games.

The big problem with older phones from Samsung is they way they drop them from Android updates. For example, The Ace 2 has decent hardware, but is on 2.6. You have to ask which is likely to get updates for longer , the Samsung S3 Mini/Ace3 or a Moto G and my money will be on the MotoG. It also have very little bloat which Samsung are often crammed with, and which slow the phone down and are pain in the butt with all their updates, taking up ram and memory.

You can probably get a further Upgrade discount/Priority moments on O2. In which case the S3 Mini is a better alternative to low end Trend Plus or such. S3 Mini a decent camera too, better screen outdoors than something like Lumia 630.

The S3 Mini and Ace 3 seem to be very similar. Different screens. Amoled vs LED. I wonder which will get updates longest. Are there easy unlocks for both? Ace 3 seems to be 4G

dodzy

Any non-techie coming on here looking for a cheap phone recommendation has just un-followed the thread after getting past post #3.