OK, so, when I got my iPhone 11 back in 2019, I was absolutely won over by it – it’s a brilliant phone that I use today, capable of all the bells and whistles of a phone at the time. I was considering getting an OPPO, but I was very much lured in by how pretty the new iPhones were, and I wanted a phone that could last.
‘It’s still good, it’s still good!’ I tell myself, a fool, when I switch my SIM card from phones that I’m reviewing back into my pretty green iPhone 11, which I kept in an ugly black leather case for most of its life (I have failed you, Jony Ive). ‘It keeps up with phones in 2021!’ I say, mostly right, but ultimately hurt by one… MINOR thing.
The iPhone 11 features a 60Hz refresh rate, as does the iPhone 12. This… Isn’t a problem. Nope, not a big deal. I don’t care. It’s not that important to most people and it’s a tiny feature anyway…
… Oh my god why does my iPhone look THIS much slower than most phones I review now.
Let me explain refresh rates. A refresh rate on a phone means how many times your screen refreshes in a second (similar to “Frames Per Second” for graphics cards and games, abbreviated as FPS, not to be confused with “First Person Shooter”, which is the video game genre in which you look through a characters eyes and have a gun). Higher refresh rates make your phone screen look smoother when using apps and games that support higher refresh rates.
For example, a 90Hz refresh rate on a monitor or a phone means that the device refreshes its screen 90 times per second – on a 120Hz device, it does this 120 times per second, and so on. It’s a big deal in gaming, as you want the smoothest gameplay as possible (which comes down to the abilities of your graphics card as well), but on a phone, it’s not a big deal. Not at all. Never has been, never will be…
… I CAN’T STOP OBSESSING OVER IT. I review such a broad range of phones, marching from $200 price points all the way to $1,700, and while a lot of the more popular consumer demands have caught up between these points (decent operating system, multiple cameras, fingerprint and facial recognition and so on) it’s *the little things* that seem to make me twitch – like refresh rates!
Zac, why the heck are you this obsessed with refresh rates?
BECAUSE when I use a phone that has a high refresh rate, such as the ASUS Zenfone 8 (120Hz), the OPPO Find X3 Pro (120Hz) or the ROG Phone 5 (144Hz!) I am absolutely won over by how smooth the operating system looks and feels – then I go to a phone with a lower refresh rate (such as the OPPO Find X3 Neo with its 90Hz screen or the 60Hz TCL 20) and I have moments of second guessing where I’m like “Is the phone meant to be that slow, or am I the problem?”
The answer is both. The phone is meant to look that slow by design (the Find X3 Neo and the TCL 20 are both great phones), and I only think it’s a problem, because I’ve been so blessed as to see such a smooth refresh rate from 120Hz+ phones. I notice it when I’m swiping from screen to screen, I notice it when I’m gaming on my phone*, and I notice it when I’m scrolling through Facebook or Twitter. Most of the time it doesn’t really matter, but I still notice it, and I can’t seem to get over it.
*Note: Not every mobile game supports 120Hz performance, and even fewer games support 144Hz performance!
Realistically most people won’t have this problem. If you’ve been sticking to premium phones (such as the S10, S20, S21, or iPhone X, 11, 12 and so on), you’re probably used to whatever refresh rate your preferred manufacturer puts onto your device. You might even like it when a manufacturer switches to a higher refresh rate going forward. These days Apple is the only big developer which still uses 60Hz refresh rates on its premium phones (although that could change with the release of the iPhone 13, or 12s, or whatever it’ll be called), whereas Samsung has been using 120Hz screens on its Galaxy S phones since the S20.
But while the visible whiplash I get from reviewing a 144Hz phone to a 90Hz phone is something that isn’t a problem, I still want to tangent about it. It’s not like phones should be reaching the insane 144Hz refresh rates of the ROG Phone 5 anyway, there’s not even many games that refresh that quickly, but for general use, going from 144Hz to 90Hz (or to 60z) is like going from go-karting on a race track to driving a station wagon around the suburbs. It’s fine! You’ll get used to it! But the high speeds you got from the faster refresh rate are gone, and you’ll remember how smooth the screen was.
I get a similar issue when I switch from playing high-definition games on my 144Hz gaming monitor to my 60Hz TV. A game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey can look amazing on both, but it’ll be smoother on the gaming monitor.
This would only ever be a problem if you’re moving from a premium phone to a cheaper phone, for example, from the OPPO Find X2 Pro (120Hz) to the Samsung Galaxy A72 (90Hz). This probably wouldn’t matter to most people, and isn’t even an unavoidable problem; The Galaxy A52 released with a 120Hz refresh rate, and there’s other cheap 120Hz refresh rate phones out there. There’s bound to be more in the future too.
Will phone refresh rates ever be important?
Look, they are important, it’s just that refresh rates on phones aren’t that exciting, and it seems to be one of those features that Apple has been slow to catch up with. Refresh rates are side-lined among many features that tie into new phone releases, and the simple need for new phones to perform better, smoother and smarter. In 2017, the first phone to feature a 120Hz refresh rate was the Razer Phone, a device marketed towards gamers (side note, this CNET review of the Razer Phone gets what I’m saying). It would take Samsung three years before it would release a phone with a 120Hz refresh rate, the Galaxy S20, with the company using 60Hz and 90Hz up to that point. Today, some of Samsung’s cheaper devices from the Galaxy A line feature 120Hz screens.
The shift to high refresh rates seems to have been led by gaming-oriented devices (such as from Razer, ROG and ZTE), which makes sense given gaming’s demand for smoother performance. Like with 120Hz displays we’ll likely see 144Hz screens become more affordable as time goes on (already, we’re seeing such refresh rates on phones from Motorola and Vivo) but for now it’s an expensive and largely unnecessary extra.
I just can’t help but wonder where it’ll end either. Are we gonna see 240Hz phones from Samsung and OPPO before 2030? Probably, there’s already a phone that supports a 240Hz screen. Will refresh rates go up from there? Maybe, given how quickly its taken to jump from 120Hz to 144Hz.
The bottom line is if you switch from a phone capable of 120Hz to a phone that supports 90Hz or 60Hz performance, you’ll likely notice it. It’ll likely be less smooth and you’ll feel like the phone is slower or more jumpy. This probably doesn’t matter to most people – my Dad in particular doesn’t see the difference between high frame rates and low frame rates in games (Happy Father’s Day Dad), so why would he care with a phone?
For my sake, I need to get on a megaphone and stand outside some business meetings, saying “slow down those dang screens!” over and over again, so my eyes don’t have to do a double take whenever I switch from a high refresh rate phone to a low refresh rate phone. Actually, I don’t want to do this, I just wish my lizard brain could adjust better to lower refresh rate screens.
Zachariah Kelly 