Gadgetory

there was this guy that's want here from Android Authority hey guys it's crystal or from Android authority and his Josh regard from Android authority what's going on everybody and welcome to kind of a special way that we're looking at three of the main flagships that have come out this year thus far we're taking a look at the LG g5 the Samsung Galaxy s7 and the HTC 10 now since we have those three particular phones to talk about we didn't really want to do a bunch of vs. we thought we would get together and just discuss them and this will be what we call your triple threat versus and we're going to discuss these phones at length now the thing that I do need to make sure you guys all know is that if you want the more my new details like the spec sheets or even more opinions on these particular phones you can always find the full reviews here at the YouTube channel or you can head over to Android or decom for the full written reviews on all three of these devices and of course we have all of the best coverage for each and every one of these devices including this Triple Threat vs. so without any further ado we are going to get right into it we'll go section by section and we are going to talk about particular phones that we picked or maybe not so much picked but we're the ones that are going to be giving information on a particular phone and I think we'll start off InDesign with lawn over there with the probably the most different phone of this year probably the g5 the LG g5 has a brand new design it's made entirely of metal now but it also has what LG is calling a micro guys encoding which basically is just sort of their marketing lingo for it means the phone has been painted and covered in a primer so it doesn't feel quite like a true metal phone you don't get that same cold feel that you'd get with other phones out there that are just bare aluminum now the new thing about the g5 is that it has a modular design so that means that the bottom is actually removable and you can get access to the battery and you can actually still remove and swap out different batteries so that hasn't changed even though the design has this also means that you have a bunch of different what LG likes to call friends there because they're not actually all modules here so there's only a couple that are module and the rest are actually either a Bluetooth peripheral or connected by USB so you have the the camera grip and then you also have the Bang & Olufsen high-five deck and the camera grip will give you physical controls and dials over controlling the camera and then you have the hi-fi DAC which will give you better quality audio and that's basically what the LG g5 is all about in terms of design alright so going from the g5 I guess we'll go ahead and pop over to crystal for the Samsung Galaxy s7 and yes we are going to talk about the s7 edge as well yeah so with the s7 and the s7 edge we see what we're used to the glass backing metal frame nothing too new um but as always a solid solid design slightly thicker this year because we're housing a bigger battery and we have the slightly curved edges on the back like what we saw in the note 5 and of course with the s7 edge we have the curved display on the front which is mostly there for it to look cool but there are some added features of that two edge panels which we'll get to later alright so pretty standard affair from Samsung Galaxy s7 and s7 edge this year which brings us to the HTC 10 which will be the phone that I'm talking about I have it right here so the HTC 10 brings back the metal design that HTC has always been known for and this time around they've taken it and made it just that little bit bigger if you imagine HTC One m8 they just sort of added a little bit on the edges around here to create this silhouetted look so this chamfered edge provides a little bit of a subtle aesthetic that I think makes the phone look really nice that said however you have the metal construction that when you're handling in one hand it's not that hard to grip because the 5.2 inch screen is not too big especially for those that of us that like smaller phones but even then the metal construction is really premium it feels really nice even if it does slip around quite a bit now the main change is of course going to be on the front of which you don't have the boom sound speakers the dual front-facing speakers I should say you have one on the top there with a woofer on the bottom of the phone which will then add more to the let's say lower mids but definitely the lows when it comes to audio overall the HTC 10 does feel a lot like the kind of phone that HTC should have been making up until now especially with this very stealthy grey this dark grey in black it just looks really nice in in terms of design if you're looking for a metal phone this just might be the one that you're looking for at least for me I do think it's a great metal device but that brings us over to display and display should be a pretty easy one to talk about here especially considering that the HTC ten has a quad HD display now but as we have discussed on a number of different occasions all three of us here on the YouTube side AMOLED screens tend to be the ones that we're always picking the most right and I guess we can sort of go through a couple reasons why yeah well with AMOLED we have individual pixels being wet versus one big backlight which I think in my opinion gives like the more immersive experience when you're looking at videos there's going to text things just like pop out at you more and also the colors are just more punchy in your face and something that I think most people like with family more and also you get other features like you could add night clocks and I clocks look better and certain apps have dark themes which are cool to some battery saving too but overall it just you get the more immersive and engulfing experience when looking at an AMOLED display now if there's one thing that the HTC 10 is lacking I'm going to go and turn off the screen right here it doesn't have an always-on display but if you were to compare the samsung galaxy s7 and the LG g5 lawn always-on display on the g5 kind of lacking a little bit don't you think yeah so the LG g5 does have an always-on display but it's a little bit lacking in comparison to the galaxy s7 s because it's not quite as bright and that's just basically due to the nature of the LCD panel and it just it drains a little bit more battery if they had to crank the brightness all the way up so they basically had to just keep it dim in order to save battery you can still see it when you're indoors but when you're outdoors and it's a sunny day you can pretty much kind of forget about it you're not going to be able to see the information that is showing and it's also a little bit limited and what it can do it can show you the clock and it can show you a message of whatever you want it to say and that's really about it and also give you notifications of a variety of different apps even third-party apps which is probably the only leg up it has over the Samsung version but otherwise it's kind of a kind of a ho-hum feature on the g5 yeah and in the HTC 10 it is a what they call a Super LCD 5 right here and it does provide some pretty good saturation if we're going to talk about AMOLED displays and just how high the saturation is well HTC is trying to go for the NTSC standard now with that in mind I don't think that personally I don't think that the HTC 10 screen is really a slouch at all it does have really good coloration even if it doesn't quite stand up to the AMOLED and in that regard probably the g5 might be kind of doubling back just a little bit in this ranking so far when it comes to display but the differences kind of stop in this upcoming section which is performance now it's pretty easy for us to talk about performance here because every single one of these flagship phones have exactly the same type of specifications that you would expect and lawn what are those so basically you're looking at a Snapdragon 820 processor Adreno 530 and 4 gigabytes of RAM across the board on all of these devices so you can pretty much expect fast performance on all these phones and it's really just going to come down to the software optimization as to where you'll see any differences but otherwise they're pretty much all going to run pretty much identical yeah and we can pretty much go down the line as well as to say have we had any problems with these phones I would say no lawn will probably say no and crystal on the Samsung Galaxy s7 have you had any issues with performance thus far it's a very smooth experience overall like we're used to but I would say one thing I mean the briefing screen is still there which you could disable the lag is a lot less apparent this year than last year so it's much worse this years a lot more improved and that's pretty much the only complaint when it comes to performance all right and that brings us to hardware which might be one of the most exciting portions of this particular Triple Threat vs. because every single one of these phones at least in my estimation has something to really offer and I'll start off with the HTC 10 now we have the HTC 10 here with obviously the boomsound speakers and that has always been an offering by HTC but this year it's a little bit different because on the bottom here if they've taken out one of the speakers in order to make a fingerprint scanner fit there which does work pretty well you just have to hold on to that capacitive home button keep your finger there and it will unlock and wake simultaneously nice and quick but that also means that boom sound now has a front facing speaker on the top of the device and then on the bottom there is a woofer on the bottom that helps with the low ends in the audio now that's not really to say that these speakers are incredibly loud especially not when compared to previous HTC one devices or even the Nexus 6p now but it still provides a nice rich sound if you're going to be sharing your audio with everybody just using the phone you might find it just that little bit quieter than you would want it to be but it's really when you plug in headphones on here that really make it awesome and that's because boom sound has an amp and a deck a nice 24 bit DAC rather installed on the phone that will allow for some really nice sound stages in a good pair of headphones so when it comes to the audio or the music listening experience the HTC 10 is really pretty much the ACE player in these if I if I would say so myself from there you do have a microSD card slot which has been an offering before but it is one of those features that is coming back a lot this year after that it's not a waterproof device it is splash proof but it's certification is not as high as that of the galaxy s7 but overall you get a really solid device with USB type-c on the bottom and quick charge 3.0 so with being able to charge up the battery pretty quickly which we'll talk about in a bit you have overall a very good and solid device with a wonderful audio experience alright well we talked about the HTC 10 just now how about the galaxy s7 and the s7 edge over there so with the galaxy s7 and s7 edge we have the physical home button that doubles as a fingerprint scanner and it's fast you do have to actually press on the button for it to unlock but it is super fast it's not really a big big shouldn't be a big issue moving along we have the microUSB charging port on the bottom and then we have the speaker on the bottom and it's pretty poor placement and it's also not the best speaker quality suffers a little bit kind of tinny but that's because the phone is water-resistant we have a protective coating inside which is a big thing with hardware here on the s7 and the last thing would be we have the micro SD card slot on the top that holds up to 200 gigs alright and after the galaxy s7 of course our last phone number three the LG g5 / Woodlawn alright so with the LG g5 you have 32 gigabytes of internal storage and you also have a microSD card slot that allows up to an additional 200 gigabytes of additional storage for storing all of your extra media and then along the bottom here you have a USB type-c port which also accepts fast charging which is nice and the speaker is also on the bottom of the phone here and it's obviously not the best placement in the world but it is a pretty decent sounding speaker for a single speaker definitely a little bit better than the galaxy s7 on the back side you have the power button still mounted on the rear which also doubles as a fingerprint scanner and the fingerprint scanner works quite well it's actually really fast definitely one of the fastest fingerprint scanners that I've ever used it takes only a few taps to set up and you actually don't have to press the power button in order for it to actually register your fingerprint one thing you'll notice is that the volume rockers are actually no longer on the back here either they've been moved back to the side on a more traditional location which is perfectly fine by me but depending on who you are you may or may not like that change alright and because the bottom portion can be removed of course we have replaceable batteries after all the battery has to be snapped out and put into other modules but we'll go ahead and pop in to the battery life here what's the capacity in the g5 lawn and that battery what has been the battery life for you so far yeah so the capacity on the g5 is a twenty eight hundred milli ampere hour battery which is the smallest of the bunch out of these three phones but the benefit here is that you actually can still remove it and swap it out for another one and for me battery life has actually been pretty good it gets me through a full day perfectly fine the screen on time numbers aren't amazing but for me what really matters is how it performs in regular everyday use and for me up with my usage with just browsing the web checking social media watching YouTube and playing some games and things like that it last me through a full day pretty much every single day yeah I would say the same thing for the HTC 10 as a 3000 milliamp hour battery which seems like pretty much what you would want in a phone these days but with that in mind it gets through a full day pretty much as much as you would need it to and screen on time for me has been around for hours on average which is pretty good especially for someone like me that has the screen on for things like GPS I'm listening to using all the time so for a somewhat above average user like myself four hours of screen on time has been perfectly fine but that's where we get to the Galaxy s7 and the s7 edge which has a big battery and how is battery life been for you crystal yeah well as we know much better than last year's at six we have a bigger battery so we have 3000 milliamp hours on the s7 and 2600 I believe on the s7 edge and I with moderate use I get through a full day easily I would say about four hours on the s7 and four and a half hours like five hours on the s7 edge yeah and across the board we have fast charging so even if you do find yourself in single digits on your battery life you can always pop it in for just a little bit and get that power back all right which brings us to the cameras now this is always a hotly debated topic especially when it comes to these three flagships every single year and in one case we do have a camera that is hoping to improve on what has been lackluster over the last couple of years we have a camera experience in both the Samsung and LG camps that have provided some pretty good experiences thus far and we'll see how they are this year we'll start off with the Samsung Galaxy s7 and the s7 edge though what are the specs and sort of the details when it comes to both cameras on this phone well we have a 12 megapixel rear shooter and the five megapixel front shooter with the wide-angle and these cameras are super super reliable cameras whether you're taking a picture daylight or low-light you can always be confident in knowing that you're going to take a good shot we will talk about the LG g5 coming up next so cameras on this which i think is a very very fun prospect for you alright so the camera on the LG g5 is a 16 megapixel F 1.8 aperture lens so they didn't go the route of Samsung or HTC with the fewer megapixels they decided to stay with 16 but the interesting thing about the g5 s camera this year is that there's actually two lenses here so you actually have a secondary 8 megapixel sensor and the 8 megapixel sensor is a wide-angle lens which allows you to take these really awesome looking incredible looking wide-angle shots and it's just a lot of fun to use probably my favorite feature of the g5 actually as far as the front camera goes you have in 8 megapixel sensors so you're going to get pretty decent looking selfies with that it's really nothing too special but it should get the job done as far as your front-facing camera goes all right which brings us the HTC ten now the last couple of years HTC has had kind of a rough go of it when it comes to the two cameras especially when you're talking about the rear camera they've won they've gone from ultra pixel to the more conventional cameras but this year much like Samsung Galaxy s7 did we have the ultra pixels coming back there the larger pixels but there are less of them so 12 megapixels similar to the s7 is what you get in the HTC 10 that said you also have a 5 megapixel camera up front that has optical image stabilization built in now like I said every single one of these phones does have kind of a killer feature not really killer but let's say a feature that you can really kind of be happy about and I personally think that the OIS on the front-facing camera is a very nice addition but the other really great addition is the great audio recording high res audio can be recorded no matter which camera you're using so if you're a bit of a vlogger or if you're really looking towards video as what you're going to do with these phones then you will be able to do that with the HTC 10 from there you have the 12 megapixel shots that are done in the HTC camera app and in the app it has been somewhat streamlined very easy to use a lot of the modes are over on the left side so for the most part you could just use one hand in order to get a shot off and the speed of the camera app is pretty good as well it's manual mode leaves a little bit to be desired not necessarily in terms of how many things you can change but the fact that all of those sliders cover up if you have all those sliders open at one so you can cover up the entire viewfinder which is a little bit annoying but from there we have given you some information about these different cameras then well now we're going to talk about the picture quality because we took pictures with all three of these phones in a bunch of different situations and it's these pictures that were going to use to give our opinions on what we think might be a better camera so lawn actually had a lot of really pertinent things to say about this comparison yes so we all sort of had a chance to take a look at all these photos I think we sort of came to sort of the same consensus and took away a few themes if you will from all these camera samples the first thing that we noticed right away is that the HTC 10 sort of over exposes a lot with their images and also it lacked the images lack a lot of color and contrast in comparison to the g5 and the s7 they just look a little bit muted and a little bit washed out another thing that we noticed is that the s7 has pretty good dynamic range and if you compare to something like the g5 you can definitely see how much better it is in the shadows whereas on the g5 the g5 tends to really sort of crush those areas and you sort of lose a lot of detail and you'll sort of see that in some of these car images especially if you look in the darker grill areas of the car you can see those details on the galaxy s7 whereas on the g5 they're really dark and it sort of just looks more like a black hole instead of an actual grill so if you had this kind of experience crystal with the s7 and the s7 edge do you believe that it is the most reliable camera let's use that word oh definitely for sure the most hands-down of the three I would say reliable you did like I said before I always be confident knowing that that shot that you take will be a decent shot with a g5 I noticed that since it has a doesn't have that larger pixel size at night you I believe it decreases the shutter speed to account for more light into the shot and because of that you get almost blurry images like hazy not as focused sharp images at night well with the HTC 10 I do agree with everything that one said we did talk about this for a bit so the picture quality is actually pretty much on par on the HTC 10 it just doesn't really excel in any one particular place except for audio which again like I said if video is going to be the thing the audio is so good I just released a camera feature focus on and you can hear me actually vlogging on the HTC 10 in the audio sounds amazing from there however there is a little bit of a lack of saturation and a little bit of a lack of sharpness but that is also something you see in the galaxy s7 from time to time because it has less pixel on megapixels and they are larger pixels of course but at least with the s7 they've leveraged that for better autofocus whereas HTC has sort of just kept two laser autofocus for what it uses for focusing systems but the HTC ten by any means is not the worst camera out there it's just not also the best one so that should pretty much do it for the camera section we can move on to our final section before we give you our full opinions on these phones we'll talk about the software now we have three different versions of Android here and I think everyone has a lot of opinions no matter which one you get I'm going to start off though we have the HTC ten with a very Google esque sense on here so there's no more sense versions or anything like that it's just Android with HTC Sense and if you're used to since in the past you get a very familiar looking interface here with the app drawer that is a paginated scroll going up and down rather than side-to-side and then of course you have blinkfeed over on the side now blinkfeed to me has always been my favorite news aggregation second home screen experience and I've always enjoyed it more than briefing or anything that LG has put out for their second home screens that they've changed it up a few times but ultimately what I love the most about sense is that everything just sort of no pun intended makes sense everything is exactly where you would want it to be there's not really any flourishes it's not trying too hard to look like eye candy it's a very functional version of Android and because it has a darker tone about it it doesn't look too cartoony in pretty much any portion of it and it just feels like function is king in this version of Android but that would bring us over if we're going to look at the two spectrums I guess we can go over to the galaxy s7 and see how TouchWiz is this year well TouchWiz I believe just gets better every year and this year it is better you have more of a tone down color scheme you don't have like that neon green blue that we saw last year you have more of a like blue grayish color scheme which I prefer but of course you can always change that in the theme store too or get a new home launcher and then of course the icons I would say are a bit cartoony like and I see this with the g5 too but once again you can always change that with the home launcher as far as features that we get with soft areas we have multitasking which is always a good feature and edge panels on s7 edge you get shortcuts to contacts emails bunch of stuff you have a bunch of widgets pretty much but I said this before and I really think the purpose of that curved edge just for the design aspect to make it look cool but then edge panel is always good if you remember that it's there it's always good to make the phone experience that look faster and a lot easier to use which is over to the LG g5 and the return of the LG in this case is called the UX it's not the UI anymore the LG u X so with LG g5 you have Android 6.0 marshmallow like the rest of these devices but you're dealing with LG's custom interface on top and it's still not the best looking interface but it's probably the best that it's ever looked so it's a little bit cartoony still as far as the icons go and some of the animations are also a little bit cartoony but it's a little bit cleaner as far as the color scheme goes and a lot of these software features that LG used to shove in your face like the smart bulletin and the qslide are actually a little bit more hidden now but they are still there if you actually want to use them now the biggest change with LG's interface is time around is that there is no app drawer by default so all of your icons and all your applications will be sitting on your home screens and your only real form of organization is through folders but you do have the option to bring that app drawer back via a third-party launcher like Google now apex or Nova or if you really want to stick to LG software LG did release their LG home 4.0 launcher in the smart world app if you want to download that one alright so we have a lot of different ends of the spectrum here with these three phones but before I even get into any of our opinions I want to just remind everybody that to find even more details about all of these phones make sure you check out our full reviews here on Android authority comm and the YouTube channel so you can see everything that you need to know specifically about these three devices which brings us to what we're here for and that is our final section which one of these phones would you pick so I'm going to go ahead and have everybody say what phone that they would pick and I want you guys to explain why I want to start off with lawn over there so even though I'm speaking about the LG g5 and even though it is a pretty solid smart phone I'm going to have to give it to the s7 more specifically the galaxy s7 edge mostly because I feel like they really refined that particular design they took a risk with that design last year and this year they really sort of made it a little bit better and it sort of is paying off for them now it's got a bigger display a bigger battery the edge functionality is actually a little more useful now so a lot of the changes that they made this year to the s7 edge have only improved this particular smartphone and it's a really fantastic smartphone from Samsung yeah I think I would for the most part agree the galaxy s7 if you take it for all that it is it is pretty much the most reliable the most well rounded phone but I also will have to admit that when it comes to having a lot of fun on smartphones I do agree that the camera is the number one feature that I'm always looking for until HTC came out with the audio boom sound cap has a capabilities of the HTC 10 if there's one thing I do far more than use the camera its listen to music and as I listen to music on the boom sound amp and the 24 bit DAC on here with my audio Technica's I just have such a good experience with it I just have so much fun with it that I have to say that if I had to pick one phone solely for a daily driver considering that I already have a way of filming and taking pictures and whatnot with a great design and just a super-fun audio experience and a decent enough camera which I will emphasize it's not the best one but it's a decent enough camera I do have to give it to the HTC 10 I mean everybody is going to have a Samsung Galaxy s7 that's obvious I viewed I used one as a daily driver for quite a while but with the HTC 10 you're probably gonna be walking around and not too many other people have it and then that is where you get people asking wow what phone is that because that's what the HTC One the m7 DMA that's what those phones used to do and I think that the 10 is still capable of doing that and it happens to be a pretty solid phone all around underneath that surface anyway I think it's going to be 2 out of 3 here for the galaxy s7 and since crystal is the one who gave us the info on the galaxy s7 I guess you can explain to us why well yeah I'm I'd have to go with the galaxy s7 as well just because like you said I'm big on camera and I take a lot of pictures and I want an all-around just reliable camera even though all these phones are great and I know all cameras are great here especially the g5 being a super-fun camera and I think in some areas the g5 is better than s7 but the s7 all-around is a reliable experience then with HTC 10 like I said haven't used it I know it's also a good camera but yeah I'd have to go with the s7 just because of that reliability and being knowing that I'm going to take a good shot no matter what and that really is the most important thing to me well unless there's anything else that's left I think that should pretty much do it for this Triple Threat vs. we wanted to get three of our YouTube creators here to talk to you about the three flagships that have been coming this year and they are the top three phones and we wanted to bring you a comparison among all three of them in a sort of more casual more easily digestible format so hopefully you guys enjoyed that let us know if you did in the comments below and drop us some likes on this video if you did enjoy this version of the vs. format from there we might do these a little bit more but again you can always see our content for all of these phones at Android or decom and of course here at the YouTube channel if you haven't already make sure you guys subscribe that should pretty much do it for this vs. video so altogether guys we are your source remember that we are your source for all things Android Android you