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what's going on Android lovers this is Clayton Youngberg coming at you from the one and only Android Authority calm stead of bringing you a head-to-head comparison between the US carrier variant of the samsung galaxy s3 and the AT&T Sony Xperia ion but the Xperia ions a brand new phone hot on the market so is the Samsung Galaxy s3 these both have great specs and they're pretty similar so we're gonna be doing a head-to-head comparison to see which one comes out on top now mind you the Samsung Galaxy s3 is available from anywhere between one hundred and forty nine dollars online up to two hundred with Sprint's two-year contract and then the AT&T Sony Xperia ion is coming in at $99 on a two-year contract so the Xperia ion is a little bit you know in favor of the good price point anyways the specs on these two are pretty similar we've got sixteen gigabytes of storage here internal as well as on the Xperia ion now the galaxy s3 can be expandable with a 64 gigabyte card and the Xperia ion only is capable of being expanded with a 32 gigabyte card but we do have a Snapdragon s4 1.5 gigahertz processor in each of these we actually look at the two phones we can see that there are almost just about the same size the Xperia ion is rocking a four point six inch screen and then we've got the four point eight inch screen on the samsung galaxy s3 but the profiles are almost identical here we've got a little bit more thickness on the Xperia ion we've got our power buttons here our volume rocker is right here on the Xperia ion and it's right here on the samsung galaxy s3 now we use micro USB to charge both of these and the Xperia ion has micro HDMI as well as well as a dedicated camera button we don't have that on the samsung galaxy s3 but we do have the micro USB on both 3.5 millimeter head jet headphone jacks on both now as far as hardware such as cameras on both of these phones the galaxy s3 rear facing camera coming in at 3200 64 by 2448 pixels and then the sony xperia ion's rocking a 12 megapixel rear-facing camera coming in at a resolution of 4000 by 3,000 pixels so it takes the cake in that category now our front-facing camera on the samsung galaxy s3 is 1.9 megapixel capable of 720 HD 720p HD excuse me HD video and then the Xperia ion has a 1.3 megapixel front-facing with 720p capabilities as well now talking a little bit about the software on each of these phones you see will just pop open the lock screen on each we have a little bit of a customization going on in the Samsung Galaxy s3 through the display options and the lock screen options that we don't have on the Xperia ion now the Xperia ion is running the Timescape UI by Sony and the galaxy s3 is running the TouchWiz UI developed by Samsung now neither of these are the pure Android experience they're both carrier overlays manufacturer overlays more like and so you're not getting the full experience of Android but you are getting the added features of the UI's included on the phones now anyways the Samsung Galaxy s3 is rockin Android 4.0.4 which is Ice Cream Sandwich and it's also slated to get jellybean in the near future while the Xperia ion is a little bit behind the curve and it's rocket Android Gingerbread 2.3 now it's slated for an ICS update but even that's a little bit behind the curve considering the galaxy s3 will be getting jellybean in the near future another fact is that the galaxy s3 is already robbed well rooted it has root methods and you can update the OS to jelly bean via Sanjit mom 10 now there's no root method and you can't even unlock the bootloader on the Xperia ion as of now Sony has it locked down tight like Motorola and HTC but will hopefully be seeing a root method here in the future now anyways let's just pull down the status bar get a good idea of the differences in notifications here do you see on our Ice Cream Sandwich of course we can swipe away our notifications just like that and then clear all with the press of a button now we can't swipe away notifications on Android 2.3 operating system but we can clear all of them simply by pressing clear now there aren't any toggles such as brightness or the GPS Bluetooth and stuff like that on the Xperia ion like there are I'm a gala cs3 and you can't access the settings via the status bar we will actually have to click the Settings icon now as you can see the Times API and the TouchWiz UI both have their own themes within them Android menus and we do have a lot of similar you know customizations and stuff like that now the Xperia ion is running the sony bravia engine which is a software layer that enhances pics and videos and it's under the display settings here so we'll go ahead and enable that we can do some head to head video comparison tests now we do have our Bravia Engine enabled and one thing about the Xperia ion is you can't change the brightness well actually you can change brightness but it's not you have no option for auto brightness as you do on the Samsung Galaxy s3 where we can enable the auto brightness it is simply at your discrepancy so anyways we'll just go back a bit we can check out the Timescape UI versus they TouchWiz UI so despite running the Android 2.3 operating system anytime scape UI does give you the option of creating folders a little bit easier than the Samsung Galaxy s3 you can simply grab the desired icon and hover it over one and then you can create a folder just like that when the folders are made to have this nice four image little display there and then they come up like that now on the Samsung Galaxy s3 what you need to do is grab an item you would need to bring it to create folder and then you can drag other items to that particular folder and it comes up in a similar fashion where everything else dims and you've got your little folder segmented from everything else now anyways both of these phones are running the Snapdragon s4 processor so let's just go ahead and do some quadrant tests to see which one actually performs a little better now on the Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system we can kill our running apps for a better quadrant score simply by holding the recent app slash home key here while on the sony xperia ion we would have to go into the running apps under the apps in the settings menu so we're just going to not do that oh it will still be a fair comparison the one gigabyte of ram is not to hog DUP right now I barely booted up the phone so anyways let's open up our quadrant standard here and see which snapdragon does the best now the RAM on the galaxy s3 is going to help it out a bit two gigabytes we'll get a better score in that category but lets us run a full benchmark on each of these so we'll take a look at our quadrant scores here you can see on the Samsung Galaxy s3 we scored a forty seven hundred and twenty five now the CPU got seventy eight hundred twenty-five and the memory got sixty eight hundred ninety six and on the sony xperia ion we got a three thousand ninety five score so a thousand you know sixteen hundred better almost on the samsung galaxy s3 but our cpus were fairly similar we got 5751 on the snapdragon s4 in the sony xperia ion and we've got the same processor in the galaxy s3 but it was better optimized with the ram we got a bigger score by far in memory on the samsung galaxy s3 so we'll just go back to our home screen the sony xperia ion does not have the same capacitive style keys as the samsung galaxy s3 as you can see they light up on the galaxy s3 when they're used and they disappear when they're not avi um icons or you know buttons on the Xperia ion are not backlit they're just are these little reflective metal ones and when you press them you get a small little light under there but in the night time it's sort of hard to use you're gonna have to memorize where these are at in order to use them but we do have four as opposed to three on the samsung galaxy s3 anyways the screens on each of these are both very very powerful on our Xperia ion we do have the LED backlit LCD display which is coming in at four point six inches and as 323 pixels per inch now the Samsung Galaxy s3 only has 306 PPI but that's because they're stretched out across this four point eight inch display now our resolution on each is the exact same is 720 by 1280 and we've got Super AMOLED Omni Samsung Galaxy s3 so it's up for dispute a lot of people like the LCD and then a lot of people like the Super AMOLED now they're both very bright and beautiful so let's just check out a video test on each to actually see if the Bravia Engine can help enhance the quality so let's view these two as you can see the colors are looking a little bit more bright on the Samsung Galaxy s3 than they are on the Sony Xperia ion but we do have our Bravia Engine turned on these are both connected to the same Wi-Fi network their buffering at the exact same rate and of course we are watching the same video but aside from playing video let's actually get into their video taking capabilities now the 12 megapixel camera with the higher resolution on the Sony Xperia ion seems like it would perform better so let's just go ahead and test that out we'll open up our camera app now on the galaxy s3 with Ice Cream Sandwich we do have a few more integrated features as far as cameras go we do have our burst shot our HDR mode and the sony xperia ion is lacking those but we'll go through the settings really quickly we do have our scenes here our landscape we've got the night portrait night scene beach and snow party and then we have document here's our options for like scene recognition we've we're out our normal mode we do have our front camera we can do a 3d suite panorama or a 3d suite multi angle as well as a regular sweep panorama here's our exposure values and then we have our flash options on the Samsung Galaxy s3 we've got our focus options here auto focus macro face detection here are our shooting modes with single shot burst shot HDR smile beauty of the whole lot nine yards there here's our flash options and this is where we would use the front-facing camera so let's just take a few pictures here I'm going to go ahead and move a case over and we'll take it some shots of that and then we'll do the same with you Sony Xperia ion now the focus does not really respond the same way as it does on the Samsung Galaxy s3 is touch to focus but you sometimes don't know if it's even doing it you kind of have to watch and then um the images don't look as high-quality when they're on the Xperia ion screen now this does have somewhat of fast it's just somewhat of a fast shutter excuse me but it does not have the zero lag shutter that a lot of the Samsung devices these days possess now we'll go into our gallery here and check out our images we took you kind of have to load up on the Xperia ion but you can see here are the two images they look a little the whites look a little more defined on the samsung galaxy s3 but we didn't you know screw with any of our white balance settings or anything like that but they both took high quality images and they're both you know actually the ion has a better resolution as far as the images go and we do have our options for brightness and stuff like that and then our editing options in the samsung galaxy s3s menu and we also have the same options in the Xperia ions now the GPU and the Samsung Galaxy s3 is in Adreno 2 to 5 and the GPU in the sony xperia ion is in Adreno 220 not that big of a difference we got the same performance gaming and stuff like that viewing HD videos taking HD videos now I'm a little bit more on the hardware we do have the Corning Gorilla Glass 2 on the screen of a samsung galaxy s3 and on the sony xperia ion it just says it has a scratch resistant screen now that's not Gorilla Glass but it is you know going to protect against some things now we do have a specific apps native to each of these UIs we've got our s voice and our smart stay features for the TouchWiz UI we've also got our Music Hub and on the Xperia ion we have things like the Timescape social integration where a lot of the Facebook things and stuff like that are integrated right into your phone you can hook up your Facebook sync it up to your phone and it's kind of native in there now we have the music unlimited by Sony to rival the Music Hub app for the Samsung phones we do have our same Google Apps now our time scape here is where we integrate our Facebook and stuff like that and you obviously give you a quick demo of that this is one of our time scape widgets this is just our Facebook stuff here if we scroll all the way through it also integrates our Twitter and we can just basically see what all of our friends are doing in our followers and stuff like that we do have our notifications on the messaging there and basically yeah they each have their own native applications with their own user interface so it's just up in the air whether your preference is for better social integration or for more hardware-related native features then both of these have their own respective NFC tag capabilities we've got our xperia smarttags for the Sony we have our Samsung tech tiles for the galaxy s3 they work in the same way you can do the exact same things so we're not really going to demo those we do have a demo of the tech tiles on our YouTube but we're not going to demo those today so if you final thoughts the galaxy s3 does have removable battery where the Xperia ion does not but we do have the HDMI out on the Xperia ion for enhanced gameplay and stuff as well as our Bravia Engine now both of these phones are just great I love them the Xperia ion is very sexy and sleek looking it's got a very nice profile and of course is the samsung galaxy s3 as well now um I don't really have a preference over which phone I do like but the galaxy s3 does have better developer support as of now it currently has Ice Cream Sandwich the Xperia ion is lacking that it's also lacking the developer support it doesn't even have a root method but it's a very powerful phone for those of you who you know maybe aren't into robbing your phone rooting it stuff like that they're both very powerful devices and they're capable of doing anything you want experience got a 12 megapixel camera so it's got a you know a little bit of an edge there and then we do have our pros and cons on each but they're both awesome phones guys go ahead and pick one up if you're in the market either one and go ahead and drop us a comment tell you which tell us which one you think is better and maybe if you want to see some more stuff done with each of these phones let us know that but thanks for watching Android 230 calm guys and stay tune with our youtube check out our website we got everything android coming at you