4 Things to See While Buying a Smartphone

4. Connectivity

Whenever your smartphone is on, you might have noticed a letter or a mini phrase next to the signal strength icon. This will be GPRS, 2G or EDGE (commonly symbolized as “E”) for a 2G network, or 3G or HSPA (commonly symbolized as “H”) for a 3G network. In terms of quality, H is best, followed by 3G, E and then GPRS/2G. However, there are other factors like weather, your location and number of people sharing your particular part of the network that affects the quality of a network.

2G networks or GSM networks are pretty old technology now, but are very common among the Indian telecom market. They were designed predominantly for voice and text that is used for simple A to B communication. Though 2G networks allows data transfer, but are very slow and unreliable. The data transfer was then improved by GPRS (2.5G) which was followed by EDGE (E). The maximum data speed possible in a 2G network is 473Kb which is just about half an Mb - but you're not likely to get anything close to that.

3G networks are the advanced from 2G, and are primarily designed to handle data transfer. Standard 3G (or UMTS) can support data transfer speed of upto 2Mb. High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) improves 3G technology that boosts the theoretical top end mobile broadband speed to 10Mb. However, this is yet to be fully utilized by the mobile broadband service providers. In reality, even with current HSPA, you'll be very lucky to get speeds above 3Mb.

4G- the freshman among the already existing networks is looked-up with a promising potential for a large leap in data speed. Some 4G networks (also called LTE) have already started to roll out in Sweden and the US.

Bharti Airtel is the first company in India to launch 4G technology. Currently, Kolkata and Bangalore are the only cities using this technology. Airtel has stated that very soon the high speed 4G will reach to Pune, Delhi, Chandigarh and other cities of the country. Apple iPhone 4, HTC Evo Shift 4G, Motorola Atrix 4G and Samsung Galaxy S are some of the smartphones available in Indian market which come 4G enabled.