5 Reasons To Get A Gaming Phone And 5 Reasons Not To

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Here's some good news for all the gamers out there. According to a study by Australian and Chinese researchers, playing games can increase a person's grey matter and lead to better brain connectivity. In other words, playing games is actually good for you and makes you smarter.

The same can't be said for social media, which most people use their smartphones for, however. So, why not flip the script, so to speak, and get a gaming phone for school, your daily commute to work, or just because?

We play games at home already, and we have our smartphones with us pretty much wherever we go nowadays, so why not take games with us, and improve the mobile gaming experience, by getting a dedicated gaming phone — thus ensuring hours of entertainment? You have surely thought of it at some point, am I right?

Getting a dedicated gaming phone sounds good on paper, but how does the reality stack up? If you are serious about your mobile games, and if you don't want to settle for anything less than the highest frame rates, crispest graphics, and longest battery life, then a gaming phone is a must-have item — that's a given.

Here are five reasons to get a gaming phone, along with five reasons to save some money and opt for a flagship phone for playing games instead.

"But can it run Crysis?" is the measuring stick by which all gaming hardware is analyzed nowadays. Where most smartphones struggle with its demands, a dedicated gaming phone hardly breaks a sweat. Running a game and it being playable on the device with consistent frame rates are two very different things, indeed. 

One of the most compelling reasons to get a dedicated gaming phone is that each features top-of-the-line specialized hardware (such as haptic triggers), boosts in RAM, and/or the most powerful CPU or GPU configurations available, in addition to incredible screens such as the 6.8in 165Hz OLED display on the Red Magic 7. Some have dedicated cooling systems such as the Twin Turbo-Fan Cooling system on the Lenovo Legion Phone Duel 2. Not to mention a plethora of add-ons to give the user the smoothest mobile gaming experience imaginable (via Techradar). From the technical side, these phones are certainly capable of running Crysis (or others like it) in style — though it can still be rough since the game isn't optimized for mobile hardware.  

Most games from the official app store, such as Fortnite, Call of Duty, or PUBG, run like a dream on these phones.

Regular apps run better as well. More RAM means better performance when you're watching or editing a video, loading intensive apps faster, or being able to smoothly run more apps simultaneously without home-screen lag. Developers can get away with less software optimization, which is a costly and time-intensive process.

Super-popular games like PUBG and Fortnight have mobile versions as well and are as popular as ever. As a matter of fact, mobile games are taking the world by storm recently. So much so, in fact, that E-sports organizations, which have invested huge sums of money in E-sports events, are now seeing the potential in expanding to mobile games as well in order to reach a larger audience; given that the mobile gaming industry is booming right now with billions of players worldwide, and will only continue to expand as more people are playing mobile games than ever before.

Playing mobile games has become a form of rather normal social interaction for an entire generation, and a more fun form of cathartic entertainment compared to traditional movies and music. Given the rate of advancement, these high-spec'd phones assure you more longevity while enjoying the latest games.

With such great features, why aren't gaming phones featured more in the mainstream? Quite simply put, there are a few disadvantages to consider as well before pulling the trigger on a gaming phone. Poor cameras, availability issues, infrequent updates, and lack of support all plague these marvels of modern technology.

Let's take a look at some common reasons NOT to get a dedicated gaming phone and instead stick with a flagship model phone.

Given that photography is not the main goal of these phones, the cameras on many gaming models are rather an afterthought (via TechRadar).

Why would this be considered a bad thing — particularly one which is given its own paragraph? If we consider what smartphones are used for these days, cameras (whether stills photography of your cat or food, or a quick video for a Gram Story) play a huge role in the average user's social experience these days, which is why just about every mainstream phone manufacturer makes the cameras a huge priority in their feature-set. More often than not, with gaming phones, your camera experience ends up suffering a lot more overall than your gaming experience is elevated.

They certainly look cool to a certain demographic, but the aggressive designs featured on these phones usually come at the cost of well-established ergonomics. Soft curves give way to flat angular edges, which when coupled with the much-increased weight due to beefier batteries and bigger screens in excess of six inches, is not exactly an ergonomic dream for long gaming sessions.

Many of these phones listed here utilize color-changing LED's as part of their aesthetic designs, which admittedly do look quite slick — especially in a darkened room, but in daily use when you're using the phone in broad daylight, or on a train for instance, you can't really see these LED's, and thus, they end up just wasting battery power; and albeit aesthetically unique, are a somewhat wasted feature. Going out on a limb here, but there's a high chance your gaming room is decked out in LED's already, why would you need that on a phone as well? It's a mobile device for a reason, after all. Gamers do love their LEDs, however, as the popularity of the Asus ROG shows.  

The hardware in modern devices certainly improved tremendously from their humble beginnings, but the games can't keep up with the technology yet.

Most modern gaming phones have better hardware than the Nintendo Switch yet hardly any mobile game comes close in terms of graphical and gameplay quality compared to an average Switch game. One of the biggest limiting factors being thermal management, which smartphones (due to their size and design) are quite poor at for graphics-intensive games. They would simply get too hot to play an Elden Ring port — even if you could get a decent frame rate. You'd also need some serious, dedicated fans for the prolonged gaming sessions the game demands. 

The industry is slowly changing, and more "serious" games are being developed for mobile platforms and devices, but the day we can play Elden Ring on our phones is still a ways off.

Game developers want the most amount of people to be able to play their games, so you'll find few titles that have any sort of elite demands in terms of power or story involvement.

There is a delicate balance between accessibility of games, fun factor, required skill level, time frame, and profit for the developer to consider. Therefore, according to Mobile & Social Game Design, a lot of mobile games are designed to be quick, easy, and often require hours of pure grinding to get the same gear/options you could via an in-game purchase option.