Arjun Mehta

What “How to spot a fake deal online” covers

A discount is arithmetic between two numbers, and only one of them has to be real. The lower figure is what the seller will take today, and it is usually honest because they have to honour it. The higher figure it is measured against is often whatever makes the gap look largest: a maximum printed on a box, an old listing, or a figure nobody has charged in a year. That is why a listing can show an enormous percentage and still be the most expensive place to buy the thing. None of the checks below requires any tools, and each of them takes a couple of minutes.

1. Find out what the higher number is measured against. Every struck-through figure is measured against something, and the listing rarely says what. It may be the maximum printed on the box, which is a legal ceiling rather than a selling price and is often set well above anything the market charges. It may be the price on the same listing last week.
2. Read the seller, not the site. On a marketplace, the site is a venue and the listing belongs to a seller. Two listings for the same item on the same site can be two different businesses with different stock, different warranty handling and different returns. A good price from a seller with a short history and no rating is a different proposition from the same price from an established one.
3. Reviews arrive slowly, so a burst of them is a signal. Genuine ratings accumulate over months, from people who bought at different times and had different experiences. A listing with hundreds of ratings almost all posted within a few days is describing something other than a year of ownership. The same applies to reviews that all praise the same feature in the same words, and to a rating that is high while the written reviews underneath it are lukewarm.
4. Check the model number, not the model name. Manufacturers sell several versions of a model under one name, and a listing that gives the name but not the model number is leaving the most important line out. Two listings for what looks like one product can differ in memory, panel, region or bundled accessories, and the cheaper one is often the one missing something. Before comparing anything, find the model number on both listings.
5. An offer with conditions is not the price. Much of what looks like a discount is an offer with a condition attached: a particular bank card, a minimum spend, an exchange of an old device in good condition, or a coupon that has to be applied. Each is real and each may not apply to you. The figure to compare across sites is what you would actually pay at checkout, after shipping and any platform fee, with the offers you can personally use.
6. What to try, in order.
7. What to take from this. A discount is the easiest thing on a page to manufacture, because only the lower number has to be true. Ignore the percentage entirely and ask four questions instead: what does this cost elsewhere today, who is the seller, does the model number match, and what would I actually pay at checkout. Those four take a few minutes and between them catch almost everything pretending to be a bargain.
8. Common questions. Not always. Genuine clearances happen when a model is replaced, a seller is leaving a category, or stock is close to an expiry of some kind. What makes a large discount suspicious is when the seller is unknown, the model number is missing, or the warranty is described vaguely. The size of the number is not the signal; what surrounds it is.

What “Four cameras, and the one you will actually use” covers

A phone advertised with four cameras rarely has four useful ones. It usually has one main sensor that takes almost every photograph you will keep, one wide lens that is genuinely different, and one or two small sensors whose job is to appear in the specification. Knowing which is which changes what you should compare, because two phones with the same camera count can be a long way apart, and two phones with different counts can be identical where it matters. The test is simple once you know what to look for, and it takes about a minute on any product page.

Products it covers: Samsung Galaxy A56 (Awesome Graphite, 128 GB) (₹48,999 today), Motorola Edge 70 Fusion (Pantone Silhouette, 8GB RAM, 128GB Storage) (₹29,990 today), Motorola Edge 70 Fusion 5G (Pantone Blue Surf, 8GB RAM, 128GB Storage) (₹29,989 today).

1. Count the sensors that could carry a photograph alone. Only some of the lenses on a phone can produce a usable picture by themselves. The main sensor always can. A wide-angle lens can, and gives you a frame the main one physically cannot reach. A real telephoto can, and brings distance closer without cropping.
2. Stabilisation matters more than resolution. Sharpness in anything other than bright daylight is decided by whether the camera can hold still. Optical stabilisation physically counteracts hand movement, which lets the shutter stay open longer without smearing. Electronic stabilisation crops and shifts the frame instead, which helps video and does rather less for a still photograph.
3. Zoom is either real or it is a crop. A telephoto lens has its own glass at a longer focal length, so it genuinely reaches further. Digital zoom crops the main sensor and enlarges what is left, which throws away detail the moment you pass the sensor resolution. Many phones present both under one slider, so the first part of the range is real and the rest is a crop.
4. The processing decides more than the sensor. Modern phone photographs are assembled, not captured. The camera takes several frames at different exposures and merges them, correcting colour and noise on the way. Two phones with the same sensor can produce visibly different pictures because they make different choices here: one brightens faces, one keeps shadows dark, one sharpens aggressively.
5. Video has its own answer. A phone can be good at photographs and mediocre at video, because video uses a different path. The things to check are whether stabilisation stays on at the resolution you want, whether the phone can switch lenses while recording without a jump, and how long it will record before heat forces it to stop. That last one is rarely published and matters most, because a phone that stops filming after a few minutes is not a video phone, however good the first few minutes look.
6. What to try, in order.
7. What to take from this. The camera count on a box is a marketing figure, and it can be inflated with sensors nobody uses. What you will actually use is one main lens, perhaps a wide, and perhaps a telephoto if the phone has a real one. Judge those, check for optical stabilisation, look at pictures rather than specifications, and the decision becomes much simpler than the box wants it to be.
8. Common questions. Only in good light, and only if you crop. A higher count divides the same sensor area into smaller collectors, so each gathers less light. In a dim room the larger collectors win. Most high-count phones quietly combine neighbouring pixels in low light for exactly this reason.

What “Why does my phone slow down after a year?” covers

The usual explanation is that the phone is getting old and the chip inside it has somehow become slower. It has not. A processor does not lose speed — it does the same work at the same clock on its last day as on its first. What changes is everything around it: how full the storage is, how hot the phone runs, how much current the battery can still deliver on demand, and how much heavier the software has grown since you bought it. Three of those four you can act on today. The fourth is the one that quietly makes the other three visible, and it is worth understanding before you decide the phone is finished.

1. A full disk is slow long before it is actually full. Phone storage is flash memory, and flash cannot overwrite a block in place — it has to erase a block before it can write to it again. While there is plenty of empty space, the controller always has clean blocks ready and a write lands immediately. As the free space shrinks, it runs out of ready blocks and has to shuffle live data around to make one, in the middle of whatever you were doing.
2. Heat makes a phone slow on purpose, not by accident. Every phone watches its own temperature and lowers its clock speed when it climbs. This is a deliberate protection, not a fault: silicon degrades faster when it runs hot, and a phone that refused to slow down would damage itself and become uncomfortable to hold. The practical consequence is that anything which traps heat makes the phone measurably slower while it is trapped.
3. An ageing battery cannot deliver a sudden demand. This is the one that makes everything else visible. A battery does not only lose capacity as it ages — its internal resistance rises. Higher resistance means the voltage sags further whenever the phone asks for a sudden burst of current, which is exactly what happens when an app launches or a game loads a level.
4. The software grew heavier while the hardware stayed still. Apps are updated against whatever hardware is current, not against the phone you own. Over a year, the same apps you installed on day one arrive with more features, larger assets and more work happening in the background. None of this is visible as a slowdown you can point at — the phone still opens everything, it just takes a little longer each time.
5. What a factory reset actually fixes, and what it cannot. A reset is the first thing people are told to try and it is only sometimes the right answer. It genuinely clears accumulated software state: leftover services, misbehaving background agents, caches no setting reaches. What it cannot do is change physics. It will not restore a battery internal resistance, it will not make a nearly full disk behave like an empty one once you restore your data, and it will not lower the temperature of a phone in a thick case in the sun.
6. What to try, in order.
7. What to take from this. A phone that feels slower after a year is usually telling you about its storage, its temperature and its battery, in that order, and only rarely about its age. Each of those three has a fix that takes minutes and costs a great deal less than a new handset. Work through them before you shop. If the phone is still slow with room to breathe, a cool body and a healthy battery, then it has genuinely been outgrown — and at that point you are replacing it for a reason you can name.
8. Common questions. Briefly, and only when the real problem was free space. The cache exists to make apps faster, so wiping it means the next few launches are slower while it rebuilds. If you find yourself clearing it regularly, the honest answer is that the phone needs more free storage, not a cleaner cache.

More on smartphones, from the rest of the desk

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• White spots on your phone screen: what they are and what to do · Nikhil Rao

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