6 useless features your phone can do just fine without

RAM expansion on a Vivo phone is displayed as 8GB of additional RAM (Express photo)

Since even the fastest of flash storage is significantly slower than RAM when it comes to read-write speeds, there are concerns that turning on RAM expansion actually increases a phone’s power consumption.

Bottom line: it’s best to simply turn the feature off.

Depth cameras

The arrival of the portrait mode trend, where a phone blurred a subject’s background to create a DSLR-like bokeh effect, was also accompanied by depth cameras. These cameras worked together with the primary cameras to determine the difference between the phone and the subject of an image.

The recently launched iQOO Z7 has a 2MP depth camera alongside the 64MP primary and you already know why (Image credit: Vivek Umashankar / Indian Express)

But as computational photography advanced, depth cameras were made redundant and phones achieved depth effects using software or other lenses. If your phone still packs a depth camera, chances are it exists for no reason beyond taking the camera count up on your phone.

144Hz refresh rate

With 120Hz going mainstream, our eyes have grown accustomed to the fluidity that the refresh rate brings – and it’s very hard to turn back. The question arises if turning the refresh rate up further translates to greater smoothness. And helping answer that are 144Hz displays, which are quite difficult to tell apart from 120Hz displays. It doesn’t make sense to waste the battery life on such negligible benefits, making 144Hz yet another feature your phone can go perfectly well without.

RAM cleaner

Android has matured into a highly efficient operating system that handles perfectly well what apps to keep in memory and which ones to kill, meaning RAM cleaner apps many phones come bundled with are pretty much useless. On Chinese phones, these are often disguised as ‘Security’ apps and are just another way to spam you with more adware.

Perhaps an idea of how ineffective they are can be taken from the fact that they could be done away with entirely on Android 14 – or at least the third-party RAM cleaner apps.

8K video

A minute-long 8K video typically eats over 600MB of storage, twice the amount of a 4K video and four times a 1080p video. That isn’t very encouraging especially considering the fact that the improvement 8K video brings over 4K video isn’t a lot. Plus, there simply aren’t enough 8K displays around to justify recording in that resolution.

Cheap macro cameras

If your phone has a 2MP macro camera lens, then it’s highly likely that it exists for the same reason as the depth sensor – to take the camera count up. Cameras cost money and including extras, even if they are super cheap, means that the cost is being transferred to buyers in some way. Trust us, you’d be better off cropping into an image from your primary lens than using a 2MP macro (unless it’s something like the microscope on the Oppo Reno 8T).