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iPhone 4 vs Motorola Droid X

2010-07-03
what's up everyone John Brennan Justin TechnoBuffalo here with a smartphone Smackdown in one corner we have the contender Verizon is newest king of the hill the Droid X on the other we have AT&T and Apple's ruler the iPhone 4 so we're going to put these two in a 10-round smackdown you see who comes out on top so they're obviously a ton of rounds and things we can cover about these but I picked the 10 most pertinent I think summarize the phone's the best so we are going to cover display processor storage text entry browser still camera a video camera speed operating system and a few other intangibles so let's go ahead and jump right into the display you completely see a difference here the iPhone has a 3.5 inch capacitive screen with the resolution of 960 by 640 something Apple is calling Retina display you may have heard on the other we have the Droid X with a very large 4.3 inch screen capacitive as well with the resolution of 854 by 480 so even though you have a larger screen and with the larger screen you are probably going to get less eye strain the display has to go to the iPhone and you're gonna ask why am i prioritizing this in that way well from a pixel standpoint we're gonna get six hundred and fourteen thousand pixels on the iPhone and we're gonna get four hundred nine thousand twenty on the Droid X as I mentioned certainly will get less I shred on a larger screen but of more pixel density means crisper graphics sharper text more screen real estate which are going to mean less scrolling only looking at text and browsing so from a display standpoint despite the larger screen this edge has to go to Apple's iPhone 4 so one round for Apple an X let's talk about processor what sort of driving these two things well there's the 8 for system-on-a-chip that thinking that's powering the iPad put in the iPhone 4 it's often about 1 gigahertz on the other hand a really Motorola shocked many people in the shuns Qualcomm's 1 gigahertz Snapdragon chip and have said went to T Oh map processor which is the same sort of family of chips I found that a lot of phones including the original Droid but they ramped up the clock speed to 1 gigahertz it ordinarily I was a bit worried that maybe just an overclock slower chip but as you'll see this thing is a screamer very fast really capable and very uh very well rounded so from the processor standpoint this one's gotta be a drought one get here and someone getting hurt sometimes doesn't equal the same speed but as you'll see these are both very capable processors that do things a bit differently do them both very very well so we're gonna call processor age raw so next let's move on to storage and value well the iPhone 4 it's gonna come in two capacities either 16 or 32 for a $1.99 at communion and respectively and that is internal storage it's on a sort of flash drive inside you can't remove it or even stuff with the storage size that you get the dry X you can actually get storage size from 24 gigs all the way up to 40 you're 199 entry price point will be available at July 15th by the way I was getting gave 8 gigabytes of internal memory and 16 on a micro SD card it's going to come standard already installed on the phone so out of the box you're getting 24 gigs you can also replace those swap magic go all the way up to 40 if you take out your 16 gig card including the 32 so if you're a photographer you need to be able to remove storage to take things elsewhere you have the option to remove the cards as I mentioned and also you can go all the way up to 40 gigs of storage and you can tailor the phone storage size for what's best for you so from a storage standpoint and a value in that aspect the Droid X is clearly the winner here so next let's talk about keyboard both of these lacked physical spirt QWERTY keyboards so you input text would be very important I've got a records I'm an iPhone user and I found that the iPhone keyboards has been very hard to beat let's see how the Droid X stacks up to it so I'm gonna go ahead and open up a new notes application here on the iPhone and I'm going to go ahead and input some text and see how it works so we'll go ahead and get this ready so you can input text in two ways you've got either a portrait or landscape keyboard we'll go ahead and try the portrait here and both feature a very nice and really well-done autocorrect so I'll go ahead and type just simple text message Winnie the Pooh's sounds gross because it does I was able to type that very quickly and easily will go ahead and hop on over to landscape and try the same thing so mess that one up a little bit and as I mentioned I'm a big fan of the keyboard on the iPhone let's take a look at the keyboard here on the Droid X and I should mention that the Droid X is not running a standard build of Android 2.1 it's actually running a brand-new version of Motorola's motoblur clicks they've made much less obtrusive from the original motoblur and really have done a very nice job sort of having it run in the background and just augments and the things that you used regularly so we'll go into tech messages here switch back I will open up a new text message and I'll go ahead and start typing you can see the keyboard immediately is going to look different I don't you see on normal Android devices or even on Sense UI devices so I'll try and try and type here so we need to prove Seoul's gross I'll go ahead and push them to landscape and try it one more time so I made a few errors there but you know it's going to happen when you contact as quickly as possible so errors on each so I'm just gonna compare keyboard to keyboard here I gotta say the cupid on the Droid X really impressed me I think that Motorola is the keyboard recommendation here is actually better than HTC s they've used with sense I think it's better than what Google puts on a standard Android build it's nice easy to use it's well laid out was surprisingly a very quick fan of the Droid X keyboard however entering text just from keyboard to keyboard if I was we were going a keyboard keyboard comparison here it would probably be a very close closer I made side with the Droid X because the screen the keys are a little bit easier to type on but that's not the only way to input text you've got a fantastic text option here so imma go ahead and try this and see what it looks like go ahead and go to the end and tap right there and I'm gonna go ahead and hit this microphone and I'm gonna talk into it and see how it translate into text this is a test of a keyboard on the droid this is a test of the keyboard on the droid and it did it perfectly and I found that it does it very perfectly so it's a great way if you were in the car you don't want to type out a long message this really does a very nice job of doing it so if we're comparing text answering keyboards this clearly has to go to the Droid X which is saying a lot setting to keyboard on the iPhone is fantastic but the ways you can input text and things that you can do with the Droid X really beat out the iPhone here so we will go ahead and Chuck this round up to the Droid X alright so next let's go ahead and move on to browser and how each browser works and how it functions and sort of the features that you're going to get with each and we'll do a browser speed test coming up so don't worry if that's what you're looking for let's go ahead and launch the browsers we're going launch it here on the Droid X jumped on into landscape and we'll do the same thing here and we'll go ahead and jump to we'll jump to my youtube channel seems like a good enough site so while that is loading let's look at the browser here on the iPhone that's something that probably most of you are from at least I've seen somehow in passing very smooth browsing it's very smooth scrolling you can pinch and zoom if you get multi-touch to pinch and zoom and the text now as far as zoomed out as I can go it's still legible you can still buy zoomed in a little you can sort of read the text that's on there and you still read it actually relatively clearly no flash here on either device actually the iPhone certain doesn't support flash it supports html5 and a few other sort of video formats you can double tap to zoom and it just things just work well on the browser you've looked at the browser on the Droid X it works very well as well however the text on star the standard zoom you can't read a little bit lower resolutions if i zoom in there you can see the text is almost illegible it's not nearly as clear and easy to read as it is here on the iPhone you can see you can read the text on the iPhone you can't read it here on the Droid X I you do get me touch you can certainly pinch to zoom and it works well it's not as fluid I don't think as what you get on the iPhone but it's very very usable again no flash support yet for the Droid X that is saying that's going to be coming sometime in late of 2010 so we get flash 10.1 support but without flash and for comparing certain browsers to browsers I think the iPhone just offers a smoother experience scrolling as a bit more fluid it's a little bit jerky on the Motorola Droid X although the Droid X is a very capable browser I think browsing is one thing that the iPhone really does well and excels at so this round I think definitely has to go back into Apple's camp and going to the iPhone so next let's go ahead and talk about speed and how fast both of these are and both of these devices will mention a little bit support multitasking so I want to go ahead and close all running programs in the background we've got sort of a fair test let's go ahead and do that first on the Droid X I want to do this on camera so you know there's no funny business going on I'm go ahead open up this task ill and I will kill all selected apps and I'm going to go back home I'm gonna do the same thing here on the iPhone I'm gonna close everything that was running the background so then everything is now closed okay so now we're dealing with sort of apples - let us say the droids oranges let's go ahead and launch the browser so this is going to be a speed test now we're connected over the same Wi-Fi network so we'll go ahead and load up the YouTube page on each and we'll do a simple refresh test and this is gonna test pages that you visited on a regular basis so pages that already been loaded on here to see really how quickly or how slowly both of these load so you can see if they're both on here Lemaitre go ahead and do the simple refresh test and we'll see which one comes out on top same Wi-Fi network although I will say it looks like I'm getting full Wi-Fi reception here looks like I'm only getting half of the Wi-Fi reception on the Droid X something to keep in mind I'll go ahead and hit go on each let go there go there and we're off and let's see who comes out on top looks like the iPhones got a bit of an early edge but the Droid X finished that noticeably faster than the iPhone 4 did very quickly and that's despite what appears to be a degraded Wi-Fi signal string so maybe that was an anomaly maybe not let's go ahead and try loading TechnoBuffalo comm on each and see if we have a winner we have TechnoBuffalo ready to go there and we'll do the same thing here okay and we will see which one comes out on top and again TechnoBuffalo has been loaded on each of these as well so we clearly saw an edge with the Droid X and actually in all of my iPhone vs. droid phones we've seen the Android phone to be much quicker in the browsing standpoint and it looks like that is no exception here as the Droid X once again handily beats the iPhone 4 in a browser speed test very clearly the browser and perhaps the processor Network sort of coming together from a browsing standpoint creates a little bit quicker experience both one and a half to two seconds faster let me go ahead and close both of these and both of these now are just gonna be running the browser in the background now we'll try some other sort of non-scientific speed test and we'll launch applications that are similar and see if we have any sort of difference let's go ahead and open up settings so again non-scientific operand systems handle settings opening in very different ways but just to see if we can check check for Speed let's go ahead and give it a very simple world so open up settings on each so a little bit faster on the droid let's try opening up let's say Cameron can get a sneak peek here to it what the new motoblur looks like I'll be doing a full overview as well on sort of how the new motoblur works let's go ahead and open up about the camera functions on each this does have a dedicated camera button by the way on the right hand side as I mentioned in my unboxing so we'll go camera to camera and see which one opened them quicker here as well that's oftentimes application that began to dismount of lag what didn't quite well I did open up at the same time it was a little bit quicker on the iPhone actually thought that I didn't even hit it on the droid but it just took a second to load so speak to speed application why is kind of close but that quote missed closeness is definitely outweighed by the Droid X is feeding when it comes to web browsing surely it's yet to be seen how speed is going to be affected once flash X's are once flash 10.1 is on here however right now as the phones are clearly from the speed standpoint the Droid X beats the iPhone again that's something that we've seen with all of the head technobear things I've done including the incredible and the Evo 4G the Droid X appears to not be any different alright so now let's talk about still camera and I broke up still in video because they do very different things and both these are very capable devices I thought they should be handled a little bit differently so from a camera standpoint we are looking at a five megapixel sensor on the iPhone it's got a 4.3 image capture it does have LED flash and on the front it does have a VGA resolution front facing camera the still camera on the Droid X has an 8 megapixel sensor takes images at 16 by 9 dual LED flash and finish image stabilization I'm gonna go ahead and put up some pictures now you can sort of see the difference between you what they look like I'll do some in low light and high light with the flash on on each you guys can check them out okay so picture this picture stand for the notice that there's not much of a difference here the three megapixel difference between the two phones doesn't necessarily transfer to better image quality so the quality of images themselves I think are very very similar however what's going to give this edge to the iPhone is the addition of that front facing camera we're not talking about video chat here at all just people want to take a self-portrait up for example or you ever want to hold the camera now it's very nice to have that secondary option if it isn't just at the BGA resolution but you want to send the picture of something that you want to see and you want to message it out and really is a great option so from a still stand point I have to give that edge to the iPhone just because that front-facing camera if that wasn't here or if the Droid X had a fund-raising camera much like the Evo 4G would have been a very different story so now let's go ahead and jump over to video because there's a bit of a different here with video so the iPhone shoot 720p video it's got two microphones the Droid X shoot 720p video and has three microphones so I'm gonna go and put in some sample video here and you guys can sort of check out the quality all right so these are being recorded exactly the same time testing out the video and audio fidelity I'm certainly now in some high light situations just walking down streets all right so now we are testing a video in low-light situations all right so these are being recorded exactly the same time testing out the video and audio fidelity I certainly now in some highlight situations just walking down the street now we are testing video in low-light situations so looking at the quality of the video here I was very surprised I actually expected the joy X quality to be a bit better but surprisingly it wasn't as good as the iPhone 4s video quality and despites extra microphone I thought the audio fidelity wasn't as good either so you can see this seems relatively obvious when they're up to each other next from a video standpoint you're gonna get a little bit better from the iPhone 4 and again that front-facing camera sort of comes into play because you can record the video from the front as well so even if the quality was more on parity being able to have that front-facing camera for video again gives it an edge in sort of video and still our two very separate categories I'm using my phone for each that was sort of the reason behind breaking them apart so next let's talk about operating system this is going to be a really hot button issue I know gets a lot of sort of the fans and fanboys and sort of people on edge it's going to come down to personal preference in whichever one you like the iPhone sort of offers a more closed Atmos truth you can live with inside of Apple's walled garden of iTunes and sort of how they want you to view media on here the iPhone is a very nice experience now you get multitasking and you have to do a lot of page scrolling to view your applications you can't really dig much deeper they're only have dedicated file manager and really isn't any widget support if you look over at the operating system on the Droid X it's running Android 2.1 with motoblur and then the past setting motoblur has been a hindrance on phones we saw with the backflip and a few other motoblur devices however they have completely updated it to make it a really nice experience and from sort of that offerings of the stand point you can do a lot if you like throw the standard icon array you can have a standard icon terrain and view it like that if you want widgets you can have wooden support so here I've got some weather and some calendar got different icons you can see down there helps me scroll between pages and the ability to also have the sort of moving wallpapers or live wallpapers really is a sort of a nice fun thing to have on your phone so the more I use Android the bigger fan I become a bit and sort of from and operating systems standpoint I think what we're getting on the iPhone is nice we've seen evolutionary upgrades from the first edition and it's a new capable operating system but it is getting a bit stale on Android seems always be reinventing itself and with these different skin so between motoblur since you want and the standard Android I get sort of three different experiences which is nice because you get to pick which one is best for you so you may like what Motorola has done here at the motoblur and say you know what the Droid actually want to be great for me you may love HTC Sense you might say you know what another device is running HTC is going to be fantastic for me or I like the stock Android build I want something that's got pure unadulterated Android 2.1 or 2.2 on it the choice goes with the consumer and I think from that standpoint the operating system on Android is going to have to get the edge' it's the first time I'm actually giving the operating system edge to angular advice but the more I use it the more that I've seen how Motorola's implemented motoblur here the bigger can of it I become so that round is going to go to the Droid X so let's talk about sort of other other intangible and other features here so from the Detroit X standpoint you will be getting flash in towards the end of the year flash 10.1 that's got multitasking does have HDMI out on the iPhone stand point you do have video chat which is awesome actually before I film this us having a FaceTime chat with a friend in London the quality was great so you actually pretty much get now free coast to coast or country to country calling it both you have iPhone force multitasking and the new three axis accelerometer or gyroscope so from the intangible standpoint so the extra features that you get and again that's what that front-facing camera really comes into play the iPhone is going to get this round so those you that be keeping track at home the display went to the iPhone processor was at I storage went to the Droid X text entry went to the Droid exports awesome keyboard and the ability to sort of speak text to it browser went to the iPhone we may have to reevaluate that once flash comes to it still camera went to the iPhone video camera went to the iPhone both of which because the presence and the usefulness of the VGA camera on the front operating system went to the Droid X the other intangibles went to the iPhone and speed went to the Droid X giving us a 10-round total of iPhone 4 five Droid X 4 and a tie at one if you guys will go back and sort of watch the video comparison I did of the Evo 4G you notice that the really intangibles here were the front-facing camera and the fork American technology gave the Evo 4G an edge taking those out anyways and you still have a very very capable phone 4.3 inch display very fast and does a lot of great things but in this 10 round test of the iPhone barely came out on top and I do say barely if you're not gonna use that phone facing camera would have been a much sort of different outcome however sort of putting everything together in total package the iPhone 4 is the winner but not by much I'm a huge fan of the Droid X it's a great phone not only is it a great phone to create value as well on a fantastic network so can't go wrong with either button head-to-head there has to be a winner and the winner here is the iPhone 4 so do you agree or disagree you see the comments going crazy but I'm very curious to what you have to say for all your tech news be sure to check out TechnoBuffalo com where you can interact with users or not both in social network or you can make your own domain create your own website with full WordPress content management TechnoBuffalo comm slash River who's your name wants to be and you even put in your own ad code make a couple bucks from it anyway guys reclusive content check me out of Twitter twitter.com slash John four Lakers I am John Rhett injure and I will see you in the next video you
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