Is Your Phone Daydream Ready ?

Google Daydream is currently one of the leading topics in the world of Smartphones & we have seen people being worried about it’s support in their own phones. So, if you are going to buy a new phone & want to know if it supports Daydream or not, keep reading ! But, if you have already purchased a new high end smartphone, hope for the best …

If you are not aware of Daydream, it is Google’s Virtual Reality (VR) platform that aims to take Smartphone VR experience to a new & advanced level. Google has partnered with many developers to embed Daydream support in various apps & games. So, basically the idea is to provide a fully featured world of VR where you can have more realistic experiences through your smartphone such as, watching movies in a Multiplex like screen, playing games like being present right into the game, traveling virtually through famous, unknown or unreachable places etc. The biggest names in this partnership are, Netflix, HBO Now, Hulu, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Need For Speed, LEGO® BrickHeadz etc. However, to boost things up Google has also integrated Daydream support in their own apps including Youtube, Street View, Arts & Culture, Movies & TV, Photos etc.

Now, Google hasn’t announced any minimum hardware requirements for Daydream but, as we have seen many Daydream Ready phones till now, I can at least tell you the confirmed requirements that your phone might already have or you want to consider while buying a new phone. The image below contains the list of the current Daydream Ready smartphones that is currently available at Google’s Official Website for Daydream.

While, all these smartphones have a lot of things in common & I am quite sure that some of these are actually must have requirements for Daydream.  So, have a look at these requirements down below,

Display

Here the minimum requirement is an AMOLED Display. If you look closely, all the devices mentioned above have an AMOLED Display. The minimum Resolution is 1080P & the minimum Screen Size is 5 inches (resolution & screen size of Google Pixel ). The maximum Screen Size is probably 5.7 inches ( as confirmed in ASUS Zenfone AR ) as a phone bigger than this will be too big for the Daydream View headset and in case someone announces a bigger headset, that may be a different story. For the Resolution there is probably no upper limit as, higher the resolution, crisper the display.

Processor & RAM

In this section, we have a few confirmations. Let’s check them one by one,

In Qualcomm Snapdragon series Processors, the minimum requirement is a Snapdragon 820 & all it’s higher variants shall also support Daydream.

In Huawei Kirin series Processors, the minimum requirement must be a Kirin 960 ( as the Mate 9 Pro is the only Huawei phone to support Daydream as of now ). This also hints that, upcoming Processors having Cortex-A73 cores will probably be Daydream compatible.

In the Samsung Exynos segment we don’t really know that even the Exynos 8890 is Daydream compatible or not as there is no official confirmation. But if it’s not compatible, then the S7 & S7 Edge may have two sets. One with Daydream compatible Snapdragon 820 processores & one with incompatible Exynos 8890 processors. So, let’s just hope that they are compatible.

In the RAM segment there is no confirmation yet. But, looking at the available devices, I think minimum 4 Gigabytes of RAM maybe needed for Daydream.

OS

Google has clearly said on their website that Daydream is supported in Android Nougat only. If you are shouting at me after reading this as some of the mentioned devices still run on Marshmallow, they will receive the Nougat upgrade along with Daydream support in near future.

So, with all these configurations we have some more devices like the S7/S7 Edge (SD 820), Zenfone 3 Deluxe ( 5.7 inch ), OnePlus 3/3T etc. Well, these phones are compatible with Daydream by hardware & Android Nougat update is also confirmed for them. But, will they get official support from Google ?

The answer is probably Yes as, Google will probably want to expand Daydream as much as possible. But, still we have to wait for the official confirmation.