SSoft9

Welcome to Soft9

This is the first post on Soft9. Most "first post" entries are throat-clearing — this one's an explanation of why this site exists at all.

GSMArena has been around since 2000. PhoneArena since 2001. Kimovil and Phone Specifications and DeviceSpecifications and Specs Phone all have variations on the same database. Every one of them is a full-time business with editorial staff, hands-on reviews, and 25 years of accumulated SEO. Building a 26th one in 2026 is, on paper, a terrible idea.

Here's why we did it anyway.

The variant problem

If you go to GSMArena and look up the Samsung Galaxy A02s, you get one page. One spec sheet. One set of photos. The page is excellent.

It's also wrong, or at least incomplete, for 43 out of 44 people looking at it.

The Samsung Galaxy A02s ships in 44 distinct variants — different model numbers, different RAM/storage configurations, different cellular bands, different default Android versions, different regional firmwares. The "Galaxy A02s" in the GSMArena page is a composite, picking one variant's specs (usually the international flagship variant) and presenting them as the canonical truth.

If you bought your A02s in India (model SM-A025M/DS), or Latin America (SM-A025M/N), or as a TracFone-branded SC-A02SAZBLU in the US, your phone is genuinely different from what GSMArena shows. The chipset might be the same. The supported network bands won't be. The pre-installed bloatware won't be. The firmware update schedule won't be.

This isn't unique to budget phones. The Galaxy S23 has 21 variants. The Pixel 8 has 6. Even the iPhone has the same problem (Apple just hides it better with model numbers like A2890 / A2891 / A2892).

The Google Play Console catalog, which is what Google uses internally to know which phones are eligible to install which apps, has every variant. It's a public dataset. Almost nobody uses it.

We built Soft9 around it.

What you get here that's different

  • Variant lists. Every device page shows all the regional/carrier/firmware variants we know about. The Galaxy A02s page lists all 44.
  • Range data instead of single values. Devices ship with multiple RAM configurations and Android versions. We surface "1–8GB RAM" and "Android 11 → 13" instead of picking one and lying about it.
  • Catalog footprint. Every device shows how many hardware features, system libraries, and OpenGL extensions it advertises. These are the actual API surfaces apps check before installing — a more honest measure of "what can this phone do" than any synthetic benchmark.
  • Computed verdicts grounded in data. "Above-average battery for its release year" is computed from the percentile of all phones released that year, not from a reviewer's opinion.

What you don't get here

  • Hands-on reviews. We're a two-person team. We don't have a phone-review lab. If you want to know whether the Pixel 9's selfie camera handles backlit subjects well, GSMArena and AnandTech still exist, and they're better at it than we'd ever be.
  • Benchmark scores. The Soft9 dataset is what Google's catalog says about a phone. Geekbench scores, AnTuTu numbers, sustained-load thermal throttling — those need physical phones and time. We don't have either.
  • Camera samples. Same reason.
  • Affiliate links. We monetize with AdSense, full stop. Nothing on this site is recommended because someone paid us.

What's coming

Over the next few months we're rolling out:

  • Buyer guides for specific markets and price points. The first one — best budget Android phones in 2026 — is up now. India, Brazil, EU, and US-specific guides are next.
  • Comparison improvements. The compare page works but it's basic. We want to add a "what does this difference actually mean for daily use" layer.
  • Search-as-you-type with proper autocomplete. Right now you have to hit enter.
  • Regional carrier views. Filter the catalog to "phones shipped on T-Mobile US" or "phones currently selling in Saudi Arabia."
  • Deep links from variant code to firmware build. This is hard, but if we can pull it off, it'll be useful for anyone trying to figure out why their specific carrier's variant of a phone got skipped on the latest update.

The point

The web has gotten worse at being a place where you can look something up and get the actual answer. SEO-optimized 5,000-word listicles, AI-generated spam farms churning out templated reviews, recipe sites with seventeen paragraphs of personal narrative before the recipe.

We can't fix that. But we can run one site, narrowly scoped, that just answers "what does this device actually do" without pretending it's anything more.

Thanks for being here.

— Marcus, on behalf of the Soft9 team

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