What Is Refresh Rate on Smartphones? 60Hz to 240Hz, Explained

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By Chester Takau · Updated September 2026 · 9 min read

Refresh rate is the number of times per second your phone's screen redraws the image, measured in hertz (Hz). A 60Hz display refreshes 60 times a second; a 120Hz display refreshes 120 times. Higher refresh rates make scrolling, animations, and games look smoother — but they cost battery, which is why most 2026 flagships use adaptive LTPO panels that drop as low as 1Hz when nothing on screen is moving.

Chester Takau

Chester Takau is an independent tech reviewer who synthesises professional testing data with real user experience to cut through marketing claims.

How refresh rate actually works

Your screen doesn't hold a still image. It repaints it constantly, dozens of times per second, whether you're watching a fast-paced game or staring at a static email. The refresh rate is simply how many of those repaints happen each second.

Two things follow from this, and both are widely misunderstood:

Refresh rate is a ceiling, not a guarantee. The panel can only show new frames as fast as the phone's processor and the app supply them. That supply rate is the frame rate, measured in frames per second (fps). A 165Hz screen playing a YouTube video shot at 30fps still only shows 30 unique frames each second — each one just gets redrawn five or six times. The extra hertz add nothing you can see.

Some content actually divides cleanly. A 120Hz panel handles 24fps cinema beautifully, because 120 ÷ 24 = 5 — every film frame gets exactly five refreshes, with no judder. On a 60Hz panel, 24fps video needs an uneven 3:2 pulldown pattern. This is one of the few cases where a higher refresh rate improves video that was never shot at a high frame rate.

Terms like Hz, fps, LTPO, and touch sampling get mixed up constantly in phone marketing. We keep plain-English definitions of all of them in our tech glossary, and the distinctions matter more than the numbers.

What this guide adds: most explainers define hertz and stop. Below, we map each refresh-rate tier to the frame rates your content actually runs at, flag the resolution-dependent trap that hides behind headline specs, and close with a 2026 buying checklist — all grounded in current testing and leak reporting, cited throughout.

60Hz vs 90Hz vs 120Hz vs 144Hz+: what each tier feels like

The jump from 60Hz to 90Hz or 120Hz is the one nearly everyone notices — scrolling text stays readable, animations stop looking like flip-books. Blind tests and user polls going back to the first 90Hz phones have consistently found people can tell 60Hz from 90Hz, while returns diminish sharply beyond 120Hz. Many users can't reliably distinguish 120Hz from 144Hz or 165Hz outside of fast games, a point Android Authority's refresh rate explainer and TechRadar's breakdown both land on.

Tier	What you actually notice	Who it suits	Catch
60Hz	Fine for reading and video; scrolling looks stepped once you've used faster	Light users, battery-first buyers	Feels dated next to any 2026 mid-ranger
90Hz	Clearly smoother scrolling; most of the 120Hz feel	Budget buyers who want smoothness without the power hit	Increasingly rare; LTPO 120Hz has taken its place
120Hz	The 2026 standard; fluid UI, clean 24fps video playback	Almost everyone — the sweet spot	Fixed-rate 120Hz panels drain battery hard (see below)
144–165Hz	Subtle gain over 120Hz; visible mainly in fast games	Mobile gamers	Most apps and games cap at 60–120fps anyway
185–240Hz	Marginal outside competitive shooters	Esports-focused gaming phones	Often resolution-locked; mostly spec-sheet territory

If you'd rather watch the tiers side by side before reading on, this walkthrough covers 60Hz through 165Hz and ties each one to smoothness, battery life, and gaming:

Why does 120Hz drain the battery faster — and does LTPO fix it?

Every refresh is work for the display controller and the GPU. On early high-refresh phones with fixed-rate panels, testing from the Galaxy S20 era showed 120Hz mode cutting battery life by roughly 20–33% versus 60Hz — the screen redrew everything twice as often even when you were reading a static page. That era is why "120Hz kills battery" still circulates.

LTPO (low-temperature polycrystalline oxide) panels change the math. An LTPO screen is adaptive: it ramps to 120Hz while you scroll, then drops to 10Hz or even 1Hz when the image is static. You get smoothness during motion and near-60Hz power draw the rest of the time. People skeptical of 120Hz in 2020 have largely come around precisely because of this.

The shift is now close to complete at the top end. Samsung's Galaxy S26, S26+, and S26 Ultra — launched February 25, 2026 — all ship with 120Hz LTPO Dynamic AMOLED 2X panels adaptive down to 1Hz, per OLED-Info's launch coverage. Apple ended years of Pro-exclusivity in September 2025 by giving the entire iPhone 17 line, base model included, 120Hz ProMotion, as Engadget reported. And LTPO AMOLED has trickled down from flagships to near-standard on mid-range Android phones, though tuning quality varies a lot between brands, as panel maker BOE explains — the same trickle-down pattern we track across our budget tech picks worth the price.

So, should you manually turn off 120Hz to save battery? On an LTPO phone, no — the adaptive logic already idles the panel, and forcing 60Hz saves very little. On a budget phone with a fixed 120Hz panel, dropping to 60Hz or an auto mode is still worth real endurance.

What's the difference between refresh rate and touch sampling rate?

These two specs get conflated constantly, and reviewers keep having to separate them:

Refresh rate (Hz) — how often the screen draws a new image. It controls how smooth motion looks.
Touch sampling rate (Hz) — how often the screen checks for your finger. It controls input lag: how quickly a tap or swipe registers.

A phone can pair a 120Hz display with a modest touch sampling rate and still feel sluggish in games, because the panel redraws fast but reads your input slowly. Gaming phones advertise touch sampling of 480Hz or higher for exactly this reason. When a phone feels "fast," it's usually both numbers working together — plus consistent software animations and a chip that doesn't throttle. That's also why two phones with identical "120Hz" on the box can feel different in the hand.

The 165Hz–240Hz gaming-phone race (and the resolution trap)

Gaming phones have pushed refresh rates into territory once reserved for desktop monitors. The RedMagic 11 Pro+ ships with a 240Hz display, and the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro advertises 185Hz — but as TrustedReviews' head-to-head notes, the ROG only hits 185Hz at 720p resolution and caps at 144Hz at 1440p. That's the resolution trap: the headline hertz figure quietly depends on dropping sharpness, and buyers rarely see the asterisk.

OnePlus shows how fluid this spec race is. January 2026 leaks claimed the OnePlus 16 would carry "the highest refresh rate ever" on a smartphone at 200Hz or more (GSMArena). By June, Digital Trends reported a staged plan through 165Hz and 185Hz panels before an eventual 240Hz OLED. The most recent leak, from August 31, 2026, walks it back further: a BOE X4 panel running 165Hz system-wide with 185Hz reserved for a dedicated gaming mode (Gizmochina).

Is any of it genuine progress? For competitive players in supported titles, somewhat. For everyone else, critics have a point: most video runs at 24–60fps and most games cap at 60–120fps, so a 240Hz panel spends its life redrawing frames that already existed. None of it changes the mainstream picture — every handset in our ranking of the best smartphones of 2026 ships at 120Hz, because that's where the visible benefit for typical use actually tops out.

What refresh rate do you actually need? A 2026 checklist

Mostly messaging, email, reading: 90Hz is plenty; even 60Hz won't hold you back. Spend the money on battery and storage instead.
Heavy social scrolling: 120Hz adaptive (LTPO) is the sweet spot — this is where smoothness is most visible.
Mostly video: refresh rate barely matters beyond 120Hz, since content is 24–60fps. Prioritize panel quality, brightness, and HDR instead.
Casual gaming: 120Hz covers every mainstream title's frame-rate cap.
Competitive mobile gaming: 144Hz+ and a high touch sampling rate — and check whether the top refresh rate is locked to a lower resolution.
Budget buyer: rank it LTPO adaptive 120Hz > fixed 120Hz > 90Hz > 60Hz. An adaptive panel is worth more than a higher fixed number.

On the refresh-rate-versus-resolution question: for most people, a good 120Hz OLED at 1080p–1440p beats a sharper panel stuck at 60Hz, because you interact with motion constantly and pixel density only when you look for it. The exception is the gaming-phone trade-off above, where the highest refresh rates quietly arrive at lower resolution.

Frequently asked questions

Is 120Hz actually worth it, or is 90Hz the real sweet spot for battery life?

On an LTPO phone, 120Hz costs almost nothing because the panel idles at 1–10Hz on static content — take the 120Hz. On a fixed-rate panel, 90Hz is a genuinely good compromise: most of the visible smoothness for less power.

Can you actually tell the difference between 90Hz and 120Hz, or is it placebo?

Side by side, most people can — scrolling text stays sharper at 120Hz. In blind everyday use the gap is small enough that many users stop noticing within a day. The 60Hz-to-90Hz jump is far more obvious than 90Hz-to-120Hz.

Should I turn off 120Hz to save battery, or does adaptive refresh handle it?

If your phone advertises LTPO or "adaptive refresh," leave it on — the automation already does the saving. If it's a fixed-rate 120Hz budget phone, switching to 60Hz or auto mode can recover a meaningful chunk of screen-on time.

Do games even use 120Hz+, or are they capped at 60fps anyway?

Both. Many popular titles offer 90fps or 120fps modes on supported hardware, and competitive shooters push higher on gaming phones — but the majority of mobile games still default to 60fps. Check per-game support before paying for hertz you won't use.

Why do some 120Hz phones feel smoother than others with the same spec?

LTPO tuning, touch sampling rate, animation consistency, thermal throttling, and panel response time all sit between the spec sheet and your thumb. "120Hz" describes one component of smoothness, not the outcome.

Is a 165Hz or 240Hz phone screen pointless if most video is 24–60fps?

For video, yes — the panel can't invent frames the content doesn't have. Those tiers only pay off in games that actually render above 120fps, which today means a narrow slice of competitive titles.

Sources

Updated September 2026 with the Galaxy S26 launch, the latest OnePlus 16 display leaks, and the current gaming-phone refresh-rate class.

Transparency note: This article was researched and written by Chester Takau with AI assistance for research gathering and drafting. All recommendations reflect the author's own editorial judgment.