Many people cannot imagine life without their smartphones. Sure, the battle rages on as to what is better. Is it this Android? Or this latest iPhone? Is Blackberry even on the radar? How about a Windows phone? All these questions, however, are rendered useless when one simple fact was laid bare by an industry regulator.

Mirror reported that Ofcom conducted a small study between today's smartphones and old Nokia phones from more than a decade ago. What they found was interesting but not at all surprising: the old Nokia “bricks” can get signal much better than smartphones.

Smartphones are able to browse the web, play an impossible number of games, take the crispest pictures, but their signal receiving capacity is far inferior to yesterday's phones. In fact, modern smartphones require a signal ten times stronger just to register on the device.

An Ofcom spokesperson said that “we tested a very small number of mobile phones, not for ranking but to understand how handsets performed in different situations.”

They did not, however, release the specific list of phones, old and new, that they used to get to their conclusion. They said that there were an insufficient number of phones tested to reveal their makes and models.

What is the reason for newer phones' poor signal performance? Ofcom cited the fact that glass and metal components in smartphones impede signal reception. The fact that everything is also packed into super slim cases is another reason for the poor signals in smartphones.

These materials, which are not present in the old Nokia phones, block signals in a way that the old bricks do not. On average, smartphones require a signal that is seven times more powerful than basic phones.

Also, it is no secret that the one or two day battery life of smartphones make them highly inefficient as compared to the Nokias of old.