Gadgetory

what's up everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here and welcome to part one of the android superphone smackdown between the newest member of the verizon family the droid x and the current king of sprint's hill the evo 4g we're going to put these two head-to-head in a grueling 12 round match in this particular round we are going to cover screen call quality and speaker battery text entry browser speed at operating system and in part 2 we are going to cover camera quality both still in video design multimedia and some miscellaneous specs so stay tuned to both and to see who is the current king of android hill so we had to look at these tests and some sort of interest of brevity for 12 rounds we have 12 that I think really cover most of the aspects of the phone so today we are going to go over screen call quality and speaker battery text entry browser speed operating system the still camera quality the video camera quality design multimedia and some miscellaneous back let's go ahead and jump right in and let's start with what you look at with the phone the most the screen these are both slave devices meaning no physical qwerty keywords all of your interaction with the phones are going to be done on the screen so both sport mammoth 4.3 inch capacitive multi-touch displays the droid x has a resolution of 854 x 480 the evo 4g is resolution of 800 x 480 so 54 tall pixel difference there the 54 pixels make the droid x at something called fwvga which is supposed to be just a little taller resolution and supposed to make scrolling through applications and web pages a bit easier to reduce the amount rolling you're going to have to do well is that true so I've got the same webpage queued up on each year we've got TechnoBuffalo both of them are loaded at the top and you can see that really you can tell I'm there you can see that the texts are almost exactly the same it maybe get one or two lines more on the droid X me do on the EVO but nothing drastic so from the resolution standpoint there's not that much to see but the actual screens that are used the screen on the droid x looks a bit brighter even when resolutions and brightness at it the same and think just like a bit crisper and clearer um so from a aesthetic standpoint what's easier on the eye the droid x i think has a little bit of a nicer screen surround one is going to go to the droid x so next let's talk about call quality and speaker since these our phones and they both have to make calls the droid x is running on verizon's outstanding cdma network call quality was very good i experienced no dropped calls no white noise and lions or the other end of the phone call the evo 4g is running on sprints and an equally outstanding network call quality sound landline esk no white noise and no dropped calls as well so call quality standpoint assuming you get network service wherever you are not going to be an issue certainly the evo 4g is forgy capable but that 4g if you are in an area where you have service is right now i'm going to be just for dads if not going us back to the voice but we will talk about 4g networks later on so let's talk about the speaker quality i use speakerphone quite a bit is there a difference between two of these well i'm going to go ahead and demonstrate them for you and let you be the judge so first let's talk with the evo 4g i'm gonna go ahead and open speakerphone here i'm gonna move the phone away so all my phone numbers don't pop up and i'm gonna go ahead and just call it's a voicemail I'm gonna call claudi don't lift the phone up since is here oh wait so pretty good it's loud there's a decent amount of noise you can hear it just sounds pretty good when you're using it alright let's go ahead and jump on over now to the droid x and see how that sounds and we'll do this sort of the same test here condiments everything oh ok so then turn that off so speakerphone to speakerphone even with the evo lifted up and we're not using the included kick Sam talked about a little bit the speaker on the droid x sounds better it sounds less tinny less speaker ish and the volume even when both these are turned up all the way is just a bit louder so from a call quality standpoint both the same speaker phones important to which is what we're talking about here the droid x is going to be the winner so the droid x is once again going to take this round alright let's go ahead and jump in talk about battery life you gotta figure to both these are going to be pretty big battery hogs out of how are these large screens with these pretty big and powerful 3g networks so the battery life on each their belt or the battery themselves rather about 1,500 milliamp hours you're going to get eight hours of talktime on 3g obviously on the droid x and about two hundred twenty hours of standby on the EVO 4g you can get six hours of talktime on 3g and about 146 hours of standby so battery life is actually much improved a little bit better on the droid x you're going to get actually similar battery left what you get on the original drawing so this once again is now trumping the droid x in that standpoint so from a battery very simple way to test you're going to get a bit more juice out of the droid x so next let's go ahead and talk about text entry since again we're on a physical qwerty keyboard the only way to input text on these devices is through the screens themselves let's go ahead and talk about each neither of these i should mention are using the stock android keyboards both are using sort of a custom software manufacturing keyboard so we've got HTC's own sense keyboard on here and actually that's hardware manufacturer rather since HTC and motorola both made these and we have Motorola's motoblur keyboard here found on the droid x let's go ahead and hop in and take a look i'm gonna go and jump into messages here and we'll go ahead and start a new message i'll show you the keyboards look like so pretty standard you can use either in portrait or landscape of both are very good android does an absolutely awesome job about predictive text and correcting what you're typing really almost second to none and in previous comparisons with non Android devices I've always talks about the voice to text although I'm not going to mention that here and really compare because both phones have it and it works really well you talk to the phone and actually will transcribe what you are saying let's go ahead and talk about the keyboards so this is the sense keyboard and go ahead and try typing here and landscape and we'll see how it works have to compose and I'll go ahead and type a quick message all right so Winnie the Pooh sounds gross so we protected it to mini the Pooh but not too bad we'll go and switch on over and let's try that one more time and I will say with both these devices having the screens at this big does make typing a lot easier so Connie the Pooh sounds gross looks like it doesn't quite want to find wing in a dictionary the keyboard is pretty accurate and very easy to type on as you move your fingers over the letters you can sort of see what they are makes it a bit easier to type on let's go ahead and jump on over to the droid x and see what the keyboard looks like here to go ahead and go into text message and we'll try a new message so keyboard your seat looks a bit different we'll go ahead and try typing the same message ER so Winnie the Pooh sounds gross pretty accurate it worked well go ahead and move this over and try it one more time all right so Winnie the Pooh sounds gross so if we're going to compare a keyboard to keyboard i actually prefer the keyboard in Motorola's offering i prefer both these keyboards rather to the standard keyboard and android however what Motorola's done just made it a bit easier to use now that's not the only way that you can input text here on the droid x i can use something called swype which is pretty big rage now in the Android world you can put swype on the EVO but it comes standard on a device like the droid x let me show you very quickly what's wife looks like so go ahead and jump right down into keyboard it will hop on over to swipe and let me show you what this looks like it's another way to input text without ever having a little ifft up your finger which is kind of neat I can go ahead and just type and move your finger around I'll sort of pick the words that you want hit spacebar and it'll go ahead and type I haven't used swype that much but when I have use it's very quick and very accurate and just another reason that I think the text entry methods on the droid x is a bit superior so we're talking about text entry keyboard to keyboard i still give it to the droid x with the inclusion of skype i swipe already built in as just sort of icing on the cake so keyboard to keyboard the droid x is once again taking this round so let's see if the evo 4g can make a comeback let's go ahead and talk about the browsers if you're interested in picking up a device like the droid x to the evo 4g browser is more than likely going to be a very important factor for you so let's go ahead and talk about how both of these look so we'll go and open up the same pain to open up technobuffalo calm both of these support multitouch so pinch-to-zoom you can see that they both sort of work the same way just as fluid really no difference if you tap on text you can sort of zoom in or zoom out to play on what you're doing so did the same thing they're scrolling is very smooth on each the physics engine works quite well however I will say there is one big determining factor right now with both these devices the evo 4g supports flash content whereas the droid x does not although will support it sometime about end of 2010 but comparing these two devices as it exists right now the addition of flash gives the evo 4g a bit of an edge you have the option of whether or not you want to do flash content on the droid x you don't have that choice certainly motorola and verizon said it's definitely coming but right now it is not there so if we're comparing browser to browser and sort of the way things work gotta give it to the evo 4g let's go ahead and talk about speed how do both these things work they're both using different variants of the one gigahertz processor one is using a snapdragon ones using the TI built omap processor but does that really affect how things work ram difference let's go ahead and jump in and see how speed works on both of these devices so let's go ahead first and we will kill all running applications i'm sort of make this very same application killer task manager will go ahead and kill all selected apps and i will do the same thing here on the droid x i'll do it on camera so you know there's no funny business going on all right let's go ahead and first check web browser speed oh we're connected to the same Wi-Fi network and we've got pretty good connection on etude showing full bars let's go ahead and see if there's a difference loading web pages so we'll go ahead and open up the browser on both and we'll try loading let's say TechnoBuffalo first on both the see if there is any sort of difference arts all cued up here on the EVO and we'll do the same thing here we got it all ready to go and these are websites that have been loaded on both devices obviously you saw it on here this will be a test of cycling visit on a regular basis let's go ahead and hit go on each and see if there is any sort of difference so I'll hit it there right there and we are off and it looks like the evo 4g he's got a bit of an early edge all the droid x is showing much more content first and the droid x is done and the evo 4g is still loading and still loading and still loading now in all fairness i will say that the evo 4g is still loading Flash content and that may sort of accounts for why I took a bit longer to load we'll try some other sites that maybe are less flash intensive there's a bit a few flash things on here I'll but it's to see sort of what that looked like let's go ahead and try another website I let's go ahead and go to how about I will try and gadget he thinks you're a difference there so we've got it ready to go there and we'll see if there's any sort of difference with these two as well we don't want to search URL here we want to jump right to it alright and that will go ahead and use over speed difference here and see if it pick up the mobile version or pick up the full version so we got the mobile version and so loading the same web page without flange content of the mobile version of each the evo was a bit faster sort of interestingly enough and as I found in web pages certainly when you're viewing Flash content the evo is going to load things a bit slower however when you're doing started the same sort of web page I generally the evo is just a hair faster as we saw right here nothing that's that noticeable but if we are going to put these two head-to-head there is a bit of a difference when loading non-flash pages there's something to keep in mind so let's go ahead and talk about some application speed as well I both these are running Android so that's sort of the unique opportunity to open up the same programs on each generally when I do my smartphone smackdowns they're two completely different operating system so it's hard to sort of compare apples to apples i hate to say so let's go ahead and open up sort of similar programs on each so we'll go ahead and let's try a game for example first and let you try Jules and again all these things have running our the browser you saw me kill all applications let's go ahead and try opening up both of these at the same time which is a bit more difficult than you expected to be so loading up for exactly the same time and they finish at exactly the same time interestingly enough so let's go ahead and try something different and see if that's going to affect anything really oh that was I probably within milliseconds of the same time so hard to say who won that let's go ahead and try a few other applications that are similar on each let's go ahead and try opening up let's say amazon mp3 something that both of these devices support so I'm going to try opening that up and see if we can get any sort of speed difference here once again just about identical and that really sort of goes to show each of these devices speed wise it's almost negligible and opening up applications however when you are reviewing web browsers our web web pages non-flash the evo is going to be faster using flash pages since it's not supported right now the droid x is going to be a bit faster however we can only assume that when flash to flash is going to be there going to store to see the same thing and it's student that when browsing the evo is going to be a bit faster so if we have to declare a winner in this round application speed doesn't really affect anything because they're almost exactly the same but browser speed the evo is going to be just a hair faster so the evo 4g is going to take the speed round let's go and talk to an operating system both these are running android 2.1 up to running skins of android 2.1 when the cool things about Android Open Source all its manufacturers put sort of their own Flair on the operating system so if you guys have seen any of my reviews in the past don't know that I am a huge fan of HTC Sense which is what's running on the EVO 4G or just really well they serve did a nice job of skidding operating system so you're going to get this new tray of icons of your applications to get this new array across the bottom you get a ton of home pages you get the new feature where you can sort of zoom in and jump to different web pages and as you go through and use calendar and use the applications that are in here you get sort of some custom tweets and generally sense UI has certain beaten up on all the other competition however that is before the redesign of motoblur those you may have seen motoblur on motorola cliq or the backflip you'll know that it looked like an absolute monstrosity look like a cartoony mess however Motorola's completely redone it here for the droid x and they've may have taken a cue or two from HTC HTC a sense I mentioned sort of adds another layer to it you get a ton of sort of live wickets and icons in fact let me jump back and show you some of those extra witness you're going to get so go ahead and go to widget and here the HTC witness you see out there a ton of them that you can do turning I don't at the time this video to show you all of them but you can see that there are a lot here and they sort of work in the background always updating content so let's jump on over to motoblur and one role is than a fantastic job here about how they've implemented the operating system in the skin to sort of not be the dominant factor that it once was to use it or not use as much you like so you get sir that same icons across the bottom you can now jump to the phone you can jump right to your applications and they added a lot of widgets as well I noticed as I scroll along you'll see that that icons across the bottom let me jump from page to page makes it a bit easier to navigate similar to what i showed you on the droid that's right on the EVO 4g when you can pick the home screens it's less obtrusive so if you go to severe you can see some live witness in action let go and go to a blank you can show you some of the options here that we've got for motorola you can see that there are quite a few here as well a Wi-Fi hub of sticky notes social status social networking photo albums and there's a lot that you can really see and do here I think a lot of people have probably seen HTC Sense spend a lot of great devices you could sort of see here how it's going to work on something like the droid x it's less obtrusive you can add again add your favorite contacts here I've got the photo gallery in the music playing I've got some applications lined up on the bottom you've got some tips and tricks through your RSS feeds they can sort of scroll along and sort of see what you can have so I've got some mail and calendar and google search and weather and a few others so ordinarily HTC Sense kicks the butt of any other skin competition however Motorola's done a fantastic job so this round is most definitely a tie and that is a tribute to how good both skins are really it's going to come down to personal preference but you can't go wrong with either they improve upon stock Android without being obtrusive I think which is really the job of the operating system and the skin itself you