Gadgetory

what's up guys and girls I want to compare to the arguably hottest handsets out right now the blackberry storm for Verizon Wireless and the iphone 3gs for AT&T I'm gonna lie to you out there trying to make your mind up between the two handsets so this tests are going to cover really a lot of different features including boot up and shut down Times typing and keyboards photos and videos camera camcorder email their application stores browser and screen rotations so I'm going to go through and talk about the specs of each device and as I'm doing that let me show you the shutdown and boot up times of each i turn my phone off every night and turned on every morning so this is our time that you'll definitely notice and these are certainly real-world examples so I'll try and do these both again at the same time so we'll slide that over and hold down the power button on both so you can see how long it takes both to turn down get that little swirl on the iphone that we're all familiar with the verizon logo on lundy blackberry storm now for those you that may have seen my blackberry storm review you'll know that I said the device has a lot of potential this is when it first came out since then there have been a ton of firmware updates and as I'll show you this blackberry storm is running the most recent firmware I like to show you that just as well on the iphone 3gs is launching or is using the launch firmware three-point oh let's turn both of them on and the 3gs launches much faster than the iphone 3g but certainly not nearly as quick as the blackberry it's almost instant on with the blackberry so it is very impressive so specs of both device dimensions of the iphone 3gs you're looking at 4.2 4.5 inches x 2.4 5.48 so that's the thickness to pass were here for the dimensions of the storm you're looking at 4.43 by 2.45 5.54 so just a little bit bigger weight of the iphone you're at 4.7 6 ounces the storm clocks in a bit heavier at five or seven battery life on the 3gs you're looking at 12 hours of talk time in three hundred hours standby time he sets what the apple claims with the storm you're only looking at five and a half hours of talk time but 360 hours of standby time but real world talk time and it's the iphone 3gs claims to be actually well over double resolutions are pretty similar the iphone 3gs you're looking at at 320 x 480 the storm is 360 x 480 sighs you're at 3.5 inches for the screen of the iphone and for the storm your 3.25 camera 3 megapixels on the iphone 3gs 3.2 on the storm the iphone does VGA video at three or 30 frames per second and the 3gs comes in 16 or 32 gigabyte flavors and the storm ships with one gigabytes of internal storage and you can expand that with a microSD card now we got the role of a boring stuff let's get to the exciting stuff and the tests so the big thing with the storm is this sort of tactile clicking keyboard that rim has put in rim stands for research in motion the company that that makes us so I just watched ending because music by accident there so the screen is nice an idea but in practice doesn't necessarily translate so well when you're typing something you have to wait for the keyboard to come back up but it's something that you do get used to so let's compare the keyboards of both devices so we'll go into messages on each i'll go into messages here on the iphone i will create a new one for both so let's say that I want to create a new message we'll make it a new email that's fine Oh pets like this needs to be set up close this oh so now we are at the keyboard typing on the storm you get two options you get a very pearl ask sure type keyboard with two letters / and you can change it to look like a standard numeric keypad at the abc down 12 go order or if you turn it on your side and take advantage accelerometer you will get a full keyboard full qwerty bar the iphone has a full qwerty portrait keyboard and also has a full qwerty landscape so let's do a typing prepare sinann each and I should preface this review by saying i am an iphone user and i've been using an iphone for the past two years so just natively i'm going to have a little better accuracy with the iphone but i do want to give you guys full disclosure so i'm going to type a message using the shirt type first on the blackberry storm and i'll just type hi my name is John we'll see how it comes out ah so go my biz name is John not the most actor in the world and the shirt type can be a little bit difficult and squirrely but it does learn what you type and it doesn't learn your word so if your name is something different it will react to it and next time will type it more accurately so let's try typing the same thing now on the iphone keyboard which is one letter per let's see if we get any more accuracy with this one and we'll type hi my name is John again so a little bit closer hi my name is John but not bad either this is a reflection of my awful typing abilities or the keyboards on each aren't the most accurate in landscape or in portrait let's try in the landscape and see if that's any better we'll turn this over there's the accelerometer and we will type hi my name is John again I'll see how this worked I'm types fast as I can ok so that was actually pretty good and completely accurate hi my name is John let's try that on the iphone turn that around so that was just as accurate as well hi my name is John so landscape keyboard wise I think that they are relatively close I do prefer the keyboard on the iphone and really that's for one major reason when you hold your finger over letter you can see very clearly what letter you're typing when you're typing a letter on the focus on the storm you just get sort of a blue glow and it's hard to see where that blue go is coming from I would have liked to have seen the letter the suretype and the clicky keyboard they're really going to be a matter of personal preference I think that's something you get used to it is nice to actually feel like you're hitting a tactile button but you have to wait for it to come back up so if I'm going to evaluate keyboards completely uniquely to these devices and to try and be as unbiased as possible I'm going to give a slight slight edge to the iphone just because you can see the letters that are big type and you have the option for a full qwerty keyboard in both although I do give the store credit it is quite nice and relatively easy to learn and type on so let's move on with our review here and let's go to photos and videos so I'll go back to the home screen well put this back up the way it belongs so photos and videos and managing them on the iphone is actually relatively simple go into pictures and go into camera roll and you can view your pictures right from here so there's a picture of my niece you can use multi-touch to zoom in or zoom out and scroll over to the next and speaking of pictures and video here's a video of my dog dekhenge go ahead and hit play and the videos are stored in the same place as the pictures and the video will just start playing it's on vibrate right now so we won't hear any volume you also notice that during video you get editing ability across the top there with the iphone 3gs to scrub and cut I put a video of yesterday of how to edit video so check that out if you are interested so we'll stop this and that's really how pictures are manipulated on the iphone let's take a look at how pictures and video are handled on the storm hit the media button and now you get pictures try music video ringtones and pictures since we started with pictures on the iphone let's start with pictures on the storm go to all pictures and here are a few that i just took randomly first sample take a second open up and there you go if you want to zoom this doesn't take advantage of multi-touch pinch and zoom although the screen can support multitouch it's not really implemented in many ways so if i want to zoom in i can double tap and i can zoom and pan around just as I could on the iphone although I do want to show you one thing especially with the panning let's go back to the picture of my knees and we'll zoom in a little bit if you notice that panning is much smoother on the iphone than it is on the storm it's a little bit choppy on the store I'm going left and right you can see it's taking a while to catch up with me and it seems to go right with my finger on the iphone it's like something to keep in mind if you want to zoom out you can double tap again let's zoom back in cuz we might actually hit that down button right there zoom out and we're going to go back to the original configuration it's still zooming takes a little while to catch up and hit that button and now we're back to pictures you can scroll to the next one see the storm has a little bit of bugs in it now is definitely one of them you can't there we go the scrolling is not necessarily so smooth sometimes when it works it works very well it does not always work let's go back to the iphone so you can scroll to next nice and easily so i mentioned that i would show you what version of firmware i was running here on the storm let me go ahead and do that right now is that you can't see that i am running the most recent version that is available so i'm trying to get to the main menu I'm hitting the blackberry button took a few times to actually get there that will go to options I'll go to about you can see that I am running version 4.7 point zero point one four eight which is the most reason okay so let's go back to media let's take a look at how videos are handled so we'll go back back and now here we are in video I showed you how they played on the iphone here's a clip that was just preloaded here Babylon ed I think that's a trailer for an older movie that plays by default in landscape let's see if it rotates nope does not I'm sure where the controls are even call that if you have to Steve blackberry button there you go now you get the options so we'll we'll stop that and there are the controls took a couple button manipulation to get them to show up we'll go ahead and hit stop but you can't see that video playback is actually quite smooth on the blackberry storm okay so we'll go back to the main screen I should also say that one advantage the storm has over the iphone is that you do get a landscape landscape and portrait home screens the iphone does not allow you to do that all right so let's continue with our tests and let's talk about the camera and camcorder since both are capable of taking pictures with autofocus and recording video so I've done a video dedicated just to the iphone 3gs is camcorder but i'll show you real quickly what that looks like and the camera so you're greeted with really a very simple option if you want to zoom in on something while taking a picture if you tap it or not zoom in rather autofocus it a lot of focus and if you want to switch over to camcorder there's a little switch in the bottom right-hand corner and you flip it over and you're recording video really is easy let's take a look at the blackberry storm and see if it is just as easy so we will go to camera and now here we are in the camera application and if I want to auto focus on something just like it was on the iPhone you'll tap it and then I'll auto focus for you if you want to go to camcorder hit the blackberry button and to go to video camera and you just hit record it is pretty simple so both do have relatively capable video recording I will say the quality of the video that's your cord and the audio fidelity is definitely superior on the 3gs sick and record at 30 frames per second so moving along let's talk about email an email when you think of mobile email when you think of blackberry person it comes to my mind is fantastic and quality blackberries bread and butter that sounds funny black berry bread and butter is email that's what blackberry is known for at what they do best and the storm is no exception takes advantage of rims really amazing push email client there's nothing bad that I could even conceivably say about email on the blackberry storm it is great it's fantastic it works well email on the iphone works relatively nicely and simply as well there's an email icon at the bottom you'll hit that I'm going to move this out of the way so my emails don't show up and it's the text disappear any way that you like it you could have your title who is from and a few lines of preview text and you can also have push as well and both are capable of talking to exchange servers but as far as email goes is really nothing better than the blackberry the iphones email client is certainly capable but it's not as elegant as the black bears in my opinion so next let's talk about browser and browser speed the 3gs is equipped with 3g obviously using a tease hsdpa network and the blackberry storm is using 3g data as well on verizon wireless's evdo rev a so let's take a look at data and how quickly it loads web pages ok so the cash has been cleared out of both these devices and we're going to load technobuffalo calm on each and we'll check the speed and i turned off Wi-Fi on the 3gs so we're running just now both on cell signals and i do have five bars of eighteen t and i have four bars it cycles between four and five of evo rev.a so it is pretty fast and should be a relatively even comparison of speeds i should always say though that network speed is going to vary by your location so you may get a better service with one or both of these carriers let's go ahead and hit go on both of them at the same time and we'll see how they both do oh they both finished pretty quickly this is a simple web page although the 3gs renders it as you would see it on your main web browser these storms seems to compress it a little bit more and ignore some of the HTML spaces that will put in there notice that i'm zooming and using double tap and i can't zoom out by pinching but i can do my zoom out using the zoom out button right there the two magnifying glasses i can zoom in using pinch in or pinch out on the iphone and i can pan around with my finger just like i can on the storm so let's load a little more complicated web page and see if there is any speed difference here as well we will load engadget com alright so that's cute up on ready to go on both devices let's hit go at the same time and see if there's any difference well the storm very quickly loaded a mobile version of the site whereas the 3gs is being recognized as a desktop computers pulling up the full version I just need to be loading it pretty quickly although will tell you that by comparison evdo rev a and the iphone 3gs BS are very very close and there you go now they're both done so it depends on what you're looking for if you want the full web version of most sites then iphone will give that to you the blackberry browser is interpreted as being mobile and will load the mobile version of most sites you can scroll through each you can see I can flick scroll but it doesn't keep going when I let go of my finger I'll go just as far as I'm scrolling the iphone it flick Scrolls so the last thing that I want to show you guys is screen rotation I know this is a software thing but when you do want to turn the device you like it to turn a little bit quickly so let's see how that is on each I'll show you that they both work turn that up see the rotation here's the iphone do the rotation there and let's see how they do then both are stood straight up so the black bear was a little bit quicker although it wasn't turning and rotating nearly as much so that was just about the same so guys this video did get a little long in the wind but i do want to give you my overall impressions of both devices verizon's network is fantastic signal strength has been generally good wherever i go and call quality is great that being said a great network oh they can overcome a very buggy device the storm scene almost seems like it was rushed to market the click screen I've had dust caught in there even have fingernails caught in there and it does become a little bit difficult cumbersome to use in theory I think it's fantastic and it was a a good idea and implementation I don't think it translated very well the iphone is certainly not without its flaws it's email client could be better it could handle multitasking a little more elegantly and you couldn't be a little bit more open as far as formats that it can read and it could have external storage be quite nice like the blackberry storm has that being said I think the iphone is probably a better choice of devices and this is a 3gs at least for me based on web browsing I do a lot of work online being able to have really the full internet- flash in a few plugins in the palm of my hand is great the multi-touch zoom really makes the iphone stand out in my opinion they're both great devices and releasing depend on your carrier but if you have a choice to go anywhere the iphone 3gs is a hard one to turn away from hope you enjoyed for exclusive content be sure to follow me on twitter twitter.com / John for lakers I do all kinds of giveaways and contests and you can ask me questions and I announced the live streams there and link will be in the sidebar hope you enjoyed seeing the next one