While users and experts typically point to processor chips and wireless network connectivity as the culprit of poor smartphone performance, storage is more of an issue, according to researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and NEC Corp.
The researchers tested top selling 16GB embedded flash memory cards in several Android smartphones and found performance over WiFi declined an average of 100% to 300% across mobile applications.
In one flash memory test, performance dropped more than 2,000%.
"A good chunk of time for users is spent waiting for websites to load ... [and for] applications to load," said Hyojun Kim, a Ph.D. student in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech.
And, while waiting for apps to load is annoying, a more nefarious impact of poor flash performance is that it depletes a smartphone's battery.
Kim, lead author of the report, Revisiting Storage for Smartphones , discussed the research at the Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies here this week.
Kim said wireless network performance has kept pace with most of today's mobile applications, as have the single and dual core CPUs being used in today's sophisticated smartphones. What hasn't kept pace is the bandwidth of NAND flash, he said.
"Why would anyone want to see a 20-second wait time on their phone, particularly if the network is not the problem," he said.![]()
