Gadgetory

what's up everyone John retinue from TechnoBuffalo here back with another smartphone smackdown this time it's 218 T exclusives the Apple iPhone 4 and rims blackberry torch we're going to put these two head-to-head in a brutal 10 round series and see who comes out on top the most difficult part of these smartphone smackdowns are picking the categories that are best going to encapsulate the phones with the interest of brevity these videos can get quite long so picking really the categories that are both going to show the positive and negatives of each phone is the most difficult so in this edition we have ten categories we're going to cover cult quality reception browser email UI navigation text input speed screens apps and battery life if we're going to extend this a little bit farther we would have covered multimedia and notifications with who will touch on a bit in the UI aspects of the review so let's go ahead and get started probably most important aspect of a phone call quality if the phone doesn't sound good it's not going to be much use to you antenna gate aside when you're making calls on the iPhone zooming up case you're not having antenna issues the call quality has been very very very good I've got a clear coat on my iPhone 4 so I've never really had any antenna issues since I've put that on call quality had actually been outstanding it's crisp it's clear I have no white noise crackling on my end colors on the other end port note white noise or crackling on there and either and volume is quite loud on the blackberry torch call quality was not as good as I would expect it you guys know I test a lot of phones assess a lot of AT&T phones and it was not as good as some of the other 18 t phones I've looked at including the iPhone 4 which are comparing it to send some captivate and a few others it was a little bit tinny I had some popping noises on my hands and colored reporter hearing the same thing often times I was asked if I was on speakerphone I even though I wasn't that was infrequent but it did happen about 10 to 50 percent of the calls that I make using the blackberry torch I generally don't include call quality part of these smartphones smackdowns cuz usually they're all very good but this time I thought it was really important to bring that up when talking about the blackberry torch so around 1:00 predictably is going to go to the iPhone the next most important feature of a phone is reception call quality aside you're not getting reception it's not going to be that much used to you the iPhone 4 reception is tiddly strong generally wherever I go in my area I get about three bars to four bars of 3G service on the blackberry torch or wherever I went I had full bars of 3G service if I take my iPhone forward and go into my pantry and I shut the door I generally drop down to edge I ran the same test on a blackberry torch and I kept for four bars of 3G reception and the radios that RIM put into the torch are outstanding if you're in a fringe 3G area or maybe you get one or two bars the torch is going to be a great device for you because it seems to hold on to 3G bars and 3G service much better than the devices I've tests so this round is going to go to the blackberry torch bringing our total to one around a piece so next let's talk about browser browsing something that's very important to me it's something that I use a lot on my phone's rims while they've certainly had a ton of market share obviously declining one of the big reasons for this decline I've been Rindge browser I remember court refers to research in motion a company that makes blackberries the browser was quite simply atrocious on previous BlackBerry devices so OS 5.0 devices and older was a clumsy awkward experience rim bought a comfy it makes a webkit-based browser and what kid is the same technology that's used for the browser in the iPhone in Android and webOS so we're talking multi-touch full rich content is now finally on a black brakes let's go ahead and see how both of them compare let's go ahead and jump right in so we've got TechnoBuffalo loaded up on each you will compare the speed test we get to the speed round go ahead and jump it to browser on both and you can see that they look relatively similar scrolling on the iPhone very smooth I don't have any sort of just hit a video I don't have any sort of checkerboard pattern I worked very well certainly there's no Flash content on the side but it works quickly and that responds very well to the touch multi-touch zooming certainly works very well on certainly apples bread and butter you can zoom out of course the browser will rotate with you if you want to zoom into tech you can double tap to zoom go ahead and zoom right in and zoom right out now the blackberry torch boasts the same sort of feature set you can go ahead and zoom right in zoom right out you can see that is pretty smooth I do get that checkerboard pattern on the side that's going to come into play and we talked about the speed ahead of things but it does work very well actually rendering tests have shown that the actual speed of the browser itself as faster on the torch than it is on the iPhone however the torch is limited by its processor which again will mention the speed clocked in little over 600 megahertz @ly around 620 the iPhone we're looking at at 1 gigahertz so I think that's really where we see some of that checkerboard pattern look at the browser you scroll around fast you'll often times will come in to play the browser here as far as blackbirds go is above and beyond anything else of black grits hat using the torch from a daily driver now for four days and I've been relatively happy with the browser you get the same double tap to zoom so it takes a little bit longer to move out and get that checkerboard pattern again so the iPhone certainly doesn't have flash nor does a Blackbird torch the iPhone realizes very heavily on html5 for embedded media that will play YouTube videos in the browser a lot of other content the torch doesn't have support for flash or html5 so YouTube videos generally relying on the YouTube player and you're not going to get a lot of sort of manic content ESPN for example can be able to play videos on the iPhone you can't on the black bread torx or a representative example of a lot of other sites so the lack of html5 and sort of the hindrance of the processor are going to give the browsing edge to the iPhone but I do want to say that I think that the blackberry and rim R in particular are really on the right track with the browser it does work well it's pretty full-featured and browsing has been very smooth so get over all I think rim is on the right track and certainly worlds of improvement over what they have offered prior this round is most definitely going to go to the iPhone 4 all right now let's jump out of the browser and let's talk about email uh certainly email is as important to me as mobile browsing probably to you as well oftentimes on front of my computer I rely on email sort of get business done as I'm sure most of you guys do as well an email on the iPhone something that I've lamented for quite a while you don't have folder management I can't really star things or mark in his favorites or flag them to do things it's really pretty standard just email you get a mess if you look at it you can reply to it and there's that much management in the email application rim and black would be in particular is really their bread and butter has been email they're just known for outstanding email client and that translates very clearly over to the torch sort of the touchscreen manna that we've seen prior so I got ton of tons of emails right here and go ahead and do through scroll it's very smooth and just works well email this is a no-brainer spar anything over manage your email reply and sort of market favorites and view of folder hierarchies blackberries and get this in just a complete blow out goes to a torch if you ever used black grandpap's you know how good the email is I don't think that there's much point rehashing all the great features that go into blackberry email just say emails important to you blackberry is going to be very very very hard to beat alright so let's talk about now UI and navigation both user experiences are very very very different the iPhone the UI is very heavy on icons that's very icon base as you can see you can have some folders or you can jump in and view or if you have in this case games and you can jump out and sort of go through folder after folder an icon after icon how is really one of the the major things that the iPhone does as far as working with it very finger friendly you know you have to rely only on your finger for navigation settings and such are obviously a very finger friendly as well and go ahead and view our application settings and you go through menu after menu to get to what you like the user experience on the blackberry torch is really unlike unlike any other operating system usually these touchscreen operators have very similar interfaces the torch is relatively different so you do have icons you can status favorites you can scroll through and view different categories you have your all favorites media and I went through and gave a whole tour of blackberry OS 6 and go ahead and take a look at that later if you'd like downloads and you have the capability to select what you want to show on your home screen how much or how little so if I want to have two rows of icons here I can have two rows if I want to have more I can go ahead and change it to more and they jump back to all I can make it show three I can make it show the whole screen for I can make it just show one I can take it show none if I want or that clean look I give you the capability to really customize it a bit more it's got a great notification system as well one of the things that I really don't like about the iPhone operating system or iOS is notifications they pop up interfere with what you're doing that's a hit ok or cancel and it freezes whatever you were working on BlackBerry handles things very well here you get a whole bunch of notifications on the top it's sort of integrated with Twitter Facebook whatever you like and you go ahead and tap them you can view all your messages calendar Facebook things interview god I'm sort of a very seamless experience so both sort of offer unique ways to navigate through here you don't have to just use your finger you can actually navigate things with the touchpad here as well so you can do if you never want to use your finger you only have to go ahead and navigate through pick what you like and just select it so you can do the same thing as you would with your finger and go ahead and hit back both are very finger friendly if you use a block right in the past recording totally lost when you look at look at this but it is going to be sort of a nice LM sorry a very very nice evolutionary process of the BlackBerry operating system and because you can use your finger you can use the optical trackpad a lot of ways to use the device that's best for you this round is going to go to the blackberry torch you can customize the phones really you it any way you like and notification system is really big deal for me so when it comes to UI and navigation that one is going to go to the torch alright next let's soccer out text input phones only good if you can input text into if you want to go to a website you want compose an email text message you know how is that going to work for you let's go ahead and look at text and create on each first we'll go ahead and jump to the iPhone open up the nodes application and I'll go ahead and open up a new note and go and see what this is going to look like so text entry is a pretty standard affair you've got a portrait or a keyboard keyboard go ahead and type you know fairly well it's got predictive correcting taxes or it's what you're going to type worked very well I've got used to it on but generally of an iPhone user I'm using a torch boa it's my daily phone it works pretty well go ahead and show you a quick demonstration here this is a test you can see it works very well he throws a test and made a mistake it's pretty straightforward becomes sort of industry standard now to have an on-screen keyboard let's jump over to the keyboard on the torch because there are a few ways input text here go ahead and open up a new message so you can see sort of what this is going to look like alright so I've got a message here set up for me you notice of God so the same looking thing I've got an on-screen keyboard here I saw a portrait also saw rotating to landscape so there you go you can really have it either way you like now screen size 3.2 on the tortures of three point five you're gonna have a bit of a cramped space while typing but it does work pretty well it's got a very nice auto correction predictive text and the spellcheck much like the iPhone you move your finger on you can pick the letters this is not a sure press type device like we've seen with the storms of the past the screen does not click so he just types like it would on any other capacitive screen phone it works pretty well you can go ahead and type what you'd like take out a quick message here on the screen otherwise type it the other way and it works pretty well I'll do the same for a quick test here so this is a text in the little error but it did work now the big deal to blackberry in Turin particulars this is not the only way to get text into the phone go ahead and slide that up when you're going to get a full sort of bold 9700 looking keyboard which is one of the best keywords around and this one really is pretty true to rim design a keyboard works very well if you pick up a bowl and picked up a curve in the past you'll know immediately how to type on this and it works just well of the devices there's not as much key throw because that should be a bit thinner to be a slider but it really does work very well and I've gotten actually used to typing again on a full physical keyboard I hadn't in the past I'll show you again so just about as fast and now the bit more accuracy so text input is really good on the torch as it expect it to be on a BlackBerry device so this round as far as text input as most definitely have to go to torch you have an on-screen option if you don't want to slide it out and you want to type out a quick message or go to a quick website but you also have the option to use a full QWERTY keyboard in a package that's not very thick I see that it's still a pretty thin device so this round is going to go to the blackberry torch alright now let's go ahead and talk about speed how fast are both of these guys well the iPhone 4 is running a 1 gigahertz processor which is relatively fast the torch is running a bit slower 600 and up 24 megahertz processor and sometimes if you notice a difference our rim does a great job at memory management so multitasking and such oftentimes the phone is very very very quick out one of the big ways where I notice the speed difference is actually when it comes to browsing but we'll talk about that in a minute let's talk about sort of speed a few things go and open up similar applications oh this is not a comparative test for speed at all this is two different application different memory management's but just for a sort of an unscientific test to go to a clip calendar on you can see how they work so a little bit quicker there on the Blackburn go and open up settings are options on the Blackburn about the same so you'll see that the torch isn't a slow device we really see the slowness you saw it when I was looking at websites when it comes to scrolling very quickly sometimes you get that checkerboard pattern all the contact doesn't load it's really where the big difference is talk about speed of the browser both of these are connected to the same Wi-Fi network so let's go ahead and do a quick refresh and see how each of them work we'll go ahead and go to blackberry get it on a refresh I'll do the same thing here on the iPhone for honey both at the same time and we are off on both it again on the same Wi-Fi network so looks like the iPhone 4 is already showing content the torch is now just starting to haven't seen any text yet there we go on a torch iPhone 4 is done and the torch is still loading this is pre representative of what we see with speed on the browser OS speed relatively even again Blackbird is such a nice job memory management that it makes up for the slower processor but really when it comes to Brad's and you're going definitely going to see its big difference and because of that this round is going to go to the iPhone for a neck let's talk about screens but you're going to look at at the phone all the time on this round maybe a bit predictable for you I was I'm something that's really important to notice so the iPhone 4 has what's called the Retina display with a resolution of 640 by 960 on a 3.5 inch display other torch has a much lower 360 bike for 80 on a 3.2 inch display and pictures and such generally do look a bit washed out I'll go ahead and jump into media for example I'll show you what I what I mean go and open up a picture here I've got one of my wife's family dog you can see this was taken with the just a regular camera pictures are very very very washed how because the resolution is so low again if I could do more rounds if I would have covered camera although both of these are five megapixel sensors autofocus LED flash take great similar pictures things just look very washed out on the torch on the iPhone four things are very sharp and crisp looking at techsan websites is another way we really see its go ahead and jump back to the browser here on the iPhone 4 I can already read that text even though it's very small and difficult we can make out the through letters on the torch here just looks like blurred shape can't really see anything you start to zoom in you notice that the text looks very crisp and clear almost like it's kind of newspapers and zoom it as far as it'll go I do the same thing here on the torch can there's a little speed errors and some glitches happen and go ahead and close out of that and keep zooming in go back to the text you can definitely see a difference there into the crispness of the screen of the iPhone 4 or nearly I'm not that big into screen resolution as long as it looks nice I'm fine with it but I really noticed difference coming from the iPhone 4 to the torch so this round moose definitely has to go to the iPhone 4 next let's talk about apps apps for some things that really make the phone break the phone I depending on what you like certainly is not much you need to go ahead and rehash all the details about Apple's App Store it worked very well it really are apps for almost everything and is a very seamless experience if you're willing to live within Apple's walled garden meeting after the enter the iTunes ecosystem Rim with OS 6 and the torch launch a new blackberry apple world which does work very well you now have carrier billing support you can view sort of things as you like ton of different applications and it worked very well on the phone now one of the nice things about Rimmer was in the past that they had a pretty nice and growing catalog of applications that we use for their OS 5 devices however a lot of those apps do not work on OS 6 the things that you might be used to picking about the google apps like Google Maps are going to work very very buggy if they work at all so the apps that maybe you relied on very most for instance in Google Maps I have to be able to use on the torch and certainly that will be fixed as time goes on but right now things that I needed to use are just broken on the torch so the apps round is going to go to the iPhone so let's talk about the last thing that's important to me on the phone that's how long is it going to last me on a full day's charge I use my phone quite a bit heavy talking heavy email heavy web browsing and often times with the iPhone I can generally get through a full day on hoping for the same thing with the torch so on the iPhone after a full day of charge and I plug-in it at night and this is real-world usage share not going to talk about milliamp hours or when Apple or rim say the phones are going to work how it actually works for me as a general user generally I'm around 30% of battery life maybe the 20 to 30 range I suppose on the iPhone 4 on the blackberry torch which does technically have a lower capacity battery I'm at the 40 to 50% battery left and that's certainly with BlackBerry's push system in place and such battery life on the torch is fantastic and again that probably harkens back to a Renaissance man does a really really really good job of managing memory and suppler going managing the power levels into the phone so battery life definitely definitely definitely goes to the torch all right since this is a competition we got to go ahead and tally out the rounds case you weren't keeping track at home call quality went to the iPhone reception swung to the blackberry the iPhone struck back in browser the BlackBerry swung again in email and UI navigation we went to torch text input also went with the blackberry the iPhone took speed the iPhone stuck around for screen and also took the apps category and the BlackBerry got the last shot in with battery life which means we have a score of 5 to 5 this smartphone Smackdown ends in a tie oh it truly goes to the strengths of the torch if the torch had a faster processor and browsing was improved a little bit with html5 abilities we have a runaway winner here and I think that as time progresses we see maybe a torch to or other BlackBerry devices a torch browser they might call it we're going to see a very very very capable entry into the smartphone market from rim they've really done a very nice job for keeping up or trying to play catch-up rather I'll put some other manufacturers have done so you agree disagree or the iPhone fans gonna be upset our rim faithful going to be upset occurs to what you guys have to say I think I was fair unfair I like to hear how my looking to sort of improve my testing anyway guys I am John red your context no Buffalo be sure to check out their website for all your tech content and news create your own sub blog you can monetize it and make some money talk to each other and built-in social network I'd also check me out of Twitter for exclusive content twitter.com slash John for Lakers but I am John Rhett injure and I'll see you in the next video buh-bye you