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iPhone 4 vs. Samsung Captivate

2010-07-19
what's up everyone John rende you're from TechnoBuffalo here you know that we love smartphones smackdowns and in this edition of our vs. series we've got the two kings of a team cheese pill in one corner we have Apple's iPhone 4 and the other we have Samsung's captivate a variants of their Galaxy S series of phones they're gonna put these two suckers head-to-head in a ten round series and see who really is the king so in this ten round series we are going to cover call quality battery speed browser screen signal strength design camera text entry and offerings of them obviously are many other category covered by the interest of brevity sort of encapsulating everything that's most important to the average smartphone user these ten rounds should do a pretty decent job let's go ahead and jump right in and talk about call qualities these these are phones first and foremost the call is not gonna sound good it's not going to be much used to let's start with the iPhone 4 of call quality is actually much better than I experienced on the 3GS addition of an extra microphone way this helped with noise canceling we tested this in quiet environments and out of the street with cars driving by people on the other ends it reported very little background noise there was no popping or hissing and we were to apply it environment there was no background noise whatsoever when we were on the other end of the phone call it sounded very good to us as well held on the signal strength pretty well assuming you weren't holding a particular way I really tended to work quite well we'll talk about signal strength when we get to that round so next let's jump over to the Samsung Captivate which also has very very solid call quality I was crisp it was clear there was no white noise and both of our Texas industries and indoors you're going to get a very good calling experience from either of these devices if you're very happy to report we'd like to give high marks when Sony deserve it and both of these actually have very good call Claudia to me your go getting app signal wherever you are app and both of these were on ECGs 3G network so round 1 is going to be a time let's go ahead and jump right on into batter these things are going to suck a lot of juice 3.5 inch screen of the iPhone or the 4-inch screen on the captivate shouldn't you're going to use a lot of battery power so you want to make sure that you're gonna have something that can get you through a full day so the battery on the iPhone you're going to get 14 hours of top 10 it were just about eight hundred and forty minutes and 300 hours of standby time on the captivate you're going to get five point eight three hours of talk time or 350 minutes of top time and 340 hours of standby time so when it comes to actual talking usage the iPhone more than double the battery life of the captivate calculates gonna have about 40 hours extra standby 300 versus 340 button actually usage and daily usage I can get through a full day of heavy internet heavy email on the iPhone for about 40 percent battery left end of the day on the captivate I was just pushing maybe five percent so it's a real little test you can come easy difference between the batteries here so unless you have a car charger or you can charge at your desk while you're at work you're gonna have a difficult time getting through a full day's use with the captivate assume you're gonna use it to its fullest potential so the battery round definitely has to go to the iPhone fourth is a really great job of getting through a full day so the iPhone 4 is going to take battery alright so next let's talk about speed both these are running almost identical 1 gigahertz processor you may have heard the word hummingbird throwing around Santa prostitutes Samsung is using here in the galaxy s devices which is very very very similar to the a4 chip found in the iPhone 4 also clocked at 1 gigahertz it's been reported that the hummingbird chip is actually much faster than the Qualcomm built Snapdragon chips that we've seen we're going to put that to the test in future videos but I will say that this thing is a screamer as is the iPhone 4 let's go ahead and check speed so first let me show you that all afternoon to close in the background sure to make this a little bit fair I turned off the Y wallpapers here on the Android device to go ahead and use a task killer program and make sure everything's closed up will kill all selected apps I'm do the same thing here on the iPhone 4 to make sure things are closed although I know it isn't really true back rounding I want to make sure that at least we're apples to apples and make sure that all the available memory is free for these tests so go ahead and close everything I can see I've got a lot of things open here on the iPhone 4 I think we're slowly getting to the end of the open programs least I hope so and there we are okay so let's go ahead and see how these things compare in the speed Department will do a full browser comparisons later let's see how they load web sites so we cut into the same Wi-Fi network and these are pages that have been loaded on both devices before so consider this a test of sites that you visit on a regular basis let's go ahead and open up Safari got TechnoBuffalo getting queued up there look should have TechnoBuffalo I'm getting ready to queue it up here as well all right so we have TechnoBuffalo queued up on each of these advices I'm gonna zoom in a little bit so you can get a better sense of how these are going to work i'ma go and just hit a simple refresh on each you will check the browser speed and again both of them are on the same Wi-Fi network so I've got it ready to go here I'll do a quick refresh here as well and we'll see which one is indeed faster all right and they are off and they are hit and almost exactly the same time which is actually harder to do than you think and almost all the speed tests that we've run on the iPhone 4 versus of the Droid X Evo 4G the incredible and early no no surprise here Android has been much faster in browsing tests it actually has been noticeably faster on general speed test well see if that's what it keeps true so in the browser test least for this website clearly the captivate was much quicker let's go ahead and try another website we'll try the YouTube channel youtube.com slash John Ford Lakers alright so next we are going to try and refresh the YouTube channel which is youtube.com slash John for lickers you can see it queued up right here we'll go ahead and see if we can sort of get any sort of semblance of speed and see who is faster so it go here go here as well and we are off and we'll see which one loads I should mention if there is some Flash content here I'll talk about that in the browser which is probably going to make the iPhone 4 page load a little bit faster than we're going see on the captive a since it does have full Flash content I generally takes a little bit longer to load so go ahead and just give it one more second to sort of queue up here there it goes and it is done so definitely there was a little bit of lag here we'll talk about why in the browser you can see the video was actually already starting to play using it's sort of ingrown flash player hoping to sort of keep in mind so from and I will tell you that in general browsing doing these certain tests head-to-head the captivate in turn on flash pages was noticeably faster than other flash pages and that sort of been true with all Android devices so if served from a browser speed standpoint the captivate is definitely faster but browser not the only sort of speed test that we have let's check applications I think there's any sort of speed difference here as well so go ahead and close out go ahead hit the home button there and we'll close out this and I'll go ahead and close everything here will kill all selected apps I'll do the same thing here at one cuz that was running flash and that can take up a bit of resources so let's try opening up there's some similar applications everything's been closed let's go and open up the browser from cool and sort of see which one's quicker and you get a sensor of how fast is hummingbird processor and a4 processor really are that wasn't so fair I hit it a little bit later but you can still see that even the delay that I hit it there's still a bit of a difference but they're opening up different web pages let's go ahead and try something a bit more similar to and open up let's say calendars on each so go ahead and go to applications you can get a little bit of a sense to what the calendar system the applications look like here on the captivating so a little bit faster on the captivate let's go ahead and open up the camera applications on you can see danger a difference there so we got the camera ready there let's try it on both devices now I do know that this is sort of different different operating systems have different speeds this isn't the most scientific text just sort of way to get to see how quickly or how slowly general things are going to work on devices so in a lot of these general usage in the nuances in the speed of the phone are hard to sort of translate on video I want to get to things like transitions from screen to screen applications running in the background generally what I found is that the captivate is a bit quicker out in the iPhone for when everything is closed they're generally pretty even but we have applications running in the background I found the captivate to really excel ever had any slowdown with multiple applications running even just in the browser test as well we saw from normal web page normal web pay about Flash content the captivate is noticeably faster so we are going to give speed to the Android handset here yet again which has been the theme the captivate is going to take the speed round and since we're just talking about browsers now would be a very good time to jump in and talk about each browser so let's start here with the iPhone and this is probably a great page to look at the YouTube channel the browser on the Apple products has been outstanding here everybody knows that's been the benchmark for us for a lot of the other manufacturers how they can implement a successful browser you've got very smooth flick scrolling you've got double tap to zoom pinch and zoom works very well as fluid the physics engine meeting how quickly you scroll works very well you will notice however there is a big gap right there nothing was playing on the YouTube channel that's because this does not support flash but quite obviously Apple is sort of back see html5 course which a lot of sites are adopting however a lot of websites still relying very heavily on Flash content and if we're going to have the option to use that on the iPhone 4 I will say that I'm an iPhone 4 user and I use it because I really enjoyed the browser it's been a great experience for me that's far let's go ahead and take a look at the browser here on the Samsung Captivate let's go ahead and jump back to the YouTube account I think it's a really good place to place to start so you know wallet as low name will tell you that it works very similar to what we saw on Apple's device do you get this where the pinch to zoom and the scrolling which I can show you right here so scrolling is pretty smooth it's not as smooth it's a bit jittery but again we have some flash content right here I'll talk about you can do a double tap to zoom you have to pinch to zoom there as well you can also see now that this video is actually playing inside of the browser and that is because the captivate does support flash you can play a flash game from like flash to for seven other sort of flash game websites and it works very well now while the scrolling may not be as smooth as what we see on the Apple products be able to have flash actually have flash work really well this is probably one of the best implementations I've seen a flash on a mobile product I've tested a lot of flash capable Android devices the captivate just does a really nice job you can sort of see if they're playing I got the volume turned down and it works really really well so when it comes to browser I'm very happy to give up maybe a little bit of smooth scrolling have the ability to view almost any website on the Internet so browsing is sort of very tough but this round also has to go to the captivate as well the addition of Flash really makes it exciting you can see the video there I was actually playing very smoothly and surprisingly the audio is synced up to that as well so browser is going to the captivate all right so go ahead and close out of these we're gonna talk a bit about screens and this is going to be a quick round touch I made a video comparing the screens on each so the iPhone 4 I'll put a link to that video right now I can take a look that and sort of get a full almost 10 minute overview on the screen technologies but very briefly the iPhone has a 3.5 inch capacitive screen something I was calling a Retina display essentially means a 640 by 960 resolution I can show over 16 million colors the cafe on the other hand has a four inch capacitive Super AMOLED screen to talk about a bit earlier the touch technology is actually built into the glass itself so you're going to get sort of darker blacks two richer colors and a higher contrast ratio then you get on other phones you also gonna get better visibility in the sunlight it's got a resolution of 480 by 800 I sort of compared both of these and the overall conclusion was that they were very very very evenly matched I was one conference because that the other one the captivate has a bit of a grayish you to the color where the iPhone 4 does not color saturation is very bright on the can't debate and a little bit darker on the iPhone 4 however you can sort of see us pixels nicer when the screen resolution came into play this one really is a personal preference Brown going to watch that video for a full overview but this one is definitely a tie and really it's a fantastic time you can't go wrong either way both of them just work very very very well so it's either whichever one you decide to go with you're going to get a fantastic spring all right let's go away to talk about signaling you guys may have seen in another video that I did comparing the iPhone death grip on seven other devices clearly the iPhone four suffers from this the signal derogation when you hold it the captivate actually does almost worse than the iPhone 4 go and check that video the antenna must run on the right-hand side and the phone is held out at the right hand like this as far as drop very very very quickly so this one is also a tie but it's unfortunate tied because both of the hem suffer from severe antenna issues certain the iPhone fours and a lot talked about it a lot of phones sort of have this although Apple seems to put a big bullseye on there if you know push here to kind of lose reception but captivates mostly on the right-hand side so this one is a very sort of unfortunate I to have because neither one of them really shines as far as antenna and sort of death grip degradation and the can't debate it really isn't even have to grip it very tightly you can still sort of hold it in your hand you will have that signal strength drop out so unfortunately this one is also going to be a time so let's talk next a bit about the design certainly only you want to feel a good point on a smart phone status is always sort of a little bit associated with these sort of devices let Sarah talk about how each of them look the iPhone has a bit of a premium feel to it it's got glass on the front and certainly it has a glass on the back as well it's got stainless steel bandage running around the side here in here and it's got a very nice weight to the phone and feel like it's made of very high premium materials the captivate has this gorgeous four inch screen which is just big enough to be usable and not big enough there putting into your pocket the back is made of a plastic and metal combination the plastic here metal here no LED flash in the back we'll talk about a little bit later a captivate does feel very nice in the hand it does feel a bit lighter than the iPhone 4 and the plastic does make you feel a little bit cheaper so from a design standpoint certainly you're gonna get a removal back on the Galaxy S and it's taste goodbut captivate we're not going to remove the battery on the iPhone for sure of a design that's an example I think the iPhone serve a classic look and this round is going to go to the iPhone that can be here the comments going crazy but I prefer the way that the iPhone 4 looks at it calculate both are very good-looking devices however if I had to choose one the picking just based on aesthetics alone I would have to go to the iPhone 4 alright so next let's talk about camera both feature Phi and megapixel cameras and I'll show you guys some sampling pictures a video of what you look like so there's some differences here we've got the 5 megapixel sensor on the back of the iPhone and the 5 megapixel sensor here on the back of the captivate however you'll notice that the iPhone has an LED flash or captivate does not the iPhone also features a front-facing VGA camera for a video chat which the captivate does not so I'll put the videos and pictures up right now you guys go ahead and take a quick look to see what that looks like so you saw that video Claudia picture quality were very similar there one exception being a low light during where the LED flash would come into play so just based on that alone of the iPhone we definitely have to wing around just based on the flash how are the inclusions our front-facing camera I really sort of push it over the edge when I come to camera quality the iPhone 4 is going to sort of take this although one sort of bit of notice for the captivated thicknesses interest to you is the option that you're going to have with the camera you're going to get a bit more option wise and you can with the iPhone 4 let me show you very quickly what this looks like so you can go ahead and pick your different shooting modes beauty continuous vintage is her almost like filters that go on top you can go ahead and pick your scene mode whichever your taking pictures out and they're a ton of choices you can go ahead and almost pick your exposure value as well then you've got some visibility settings here so you get a bit more customization with what you can do with the captivate when it comes to actual quality I prefer having LED flash in the front facing camera over a few more fixture options generally I just take camera and shoot so camera quality wise the iPhone 4 is going to take this edge so now let's go ahead talk about text entry both these are called slate devices meaning they almost all they look like a slate no physical keyboard on each so how are you going to input text certainly you can't rely on a non physical on-screen kortnee keyboard the kodesh a look both knees looks like so let's go ahead and start with the iPhone we've seen this many times before and you've got two options for text centering you've got a portrait and landscape both of which actually work very well you can see through what that looks like we both have fantastic auto correction devices as well Android and Apple let me show you real quickly about what this looks like I'll do a real quick test well it's right this is a test of the keyboard so one quick error but at two ears actually I'm go ahead and move this over entice one more time on portrait and then one problem that I do have with the iPhone keyboard as I always end up I'm trying to hit spacebar or try and hit a it ends up hitting sort of the shift button of being a capital letter not what I'm looking for although I will say keyboard entry on the iPhone is very good it's certainly not perfect but it's Auto park features make it a very nice addition and the built-in spell checker in me is a nice help let's go ahead and talk about text entry on the Samsung Captivate which is a lot about talking about text entry in general on Android devices oh there's sort of a custom keyboard option here okay and try a new message let me get started the same landscape or portrait modes now there are many ways you can type text you I'm gonna go ahead and show you each of them and first I will say the Android has an awesome autocorrect if you've not used an Android device you're really not leasing out on some fantastic sort of keyboard options so I'll go ahead and do the same test here and go ahead and start type so this is a test of the keyboard sort of one very small error there and this is a device that I haven't been using for months and months like I have about the iPhone certain the iPhone 4 just came out but abusing the 3GS and before that you can see how very quickly I pick this up using this for just a few weeks I've gotten very very quick at it you can also certainly type in landscape which works quite well as well so this is a test you can see I had to make one quick error there but with Android they actually are other ways that you can input text and some things that I really like about the Android operating system so let's take a look at sort of what that is and sort of how it works you are going to have the option for using voice-to-text which is a fantastic sort of way you go ahead and talk through that what you wanted to say and Android actually put it in for you and it works just very very very well demonstrated many times in the past another sort of keep we're up you're gonna have on the captivate is also something called swipe we're gonna let you serve drag your fingers to and from on different keyboards noting that I've gotten used to but it's another way to input text and people's tend to generally like it so keyboard the keyboard it seems evenly matched but the addition of the voice to text and swipe really make the captivate a very compelling way to input text and just work really really well so if you have to pick one that definitely has to go to the captivate as far as text enter just because there are ton of options bigger screen makes for a more spacious keyboard so the captivate is going to take this round alright so next let's talk about operating system which is sort of the biggest difference between the two so the iPhone 4 is running iOS 4 actually for 4.01 the captivate is running Android 2.1 with Samsung's TouchWiz 3.0 on top of it I which does add a lot of functionality for the big issue of the debate whether you're an Apple fan or an Android fan you know what you're getting with each Apple you're getting a static interface with folders and with icons that are the same size you can navigate throughout you have to live with an sort of walled garden Vikings surveyed the content even from a lot of people are very comfortable with andrey has a bit of a more open approach you really customize the opera Testim any way you like and a lot of cool tweets and sam some actually put in what their TouchWiz interface you got almost a doc across the bottom and one of the best features I think Samsung did is actually in the pull down Minh so right up here you actually have Wi-Fi Bluetooth silent and vibration all right in that top menu which really make for a fantastic really great way to access your future certainly there are widgets that could do that but they're having adding to pull down I really think is a really nice addition to the operating system Samsung also brought sort of a ton of other sort of Handy widgets to it like we've seen with HTC in their sense I nothing revolutionary here but it is aimed rate done very well by Android 2.1 John the Android 2.2 is a very capable and really nice operating system although this one is going to be personal preference so which one you prefer certainly a lot of people obviously flock to iOS and just as many as you can be flocking to Android so this one is going to go to a tie yet again if you guys can see these are two very very very uh evenly matched phones alright so for everybody keeping traffic home here's how the ten wrath smackdown shook out first round call quality was a time battery went to the iPhone speed went to the Samsung Captivate so did browser screen was at I signal was at I design went to the iPhone camera went to the iPhone text entry went the other way to the captivate in operating system was a Thai giving us a total of iPhone for three rounds Samsung Captivate three rallies Thai four rounds I was truly is very representative of both of these handsets they are fantastic in their respective rights I can very easily use the iPhone 4 as my d-league phone and be very satisfied I'm very happy I could just as easily use the captivate and be very very very satisfied with the phone they are fantastic for the consumer for the professional everyone in between or they're not you prefer Apple's iOS 4 or Google's Android operates with samsung's tweaks to it it's really going to be a matter of personal preference whether or not you want a smaller 3.7 inch screen the larger 4-inch screen whether the resolution is more important to you or outdoor visibility with the Super AMOLED screen how to calculate it really in the truest sense the word is personal preference and you can't go wrong with either hopefully this be something that you like in this video that's gonna sway you one way or another whether camera is important to you or battery or speed or browser of this video the goal lists or push you in one direction hopefully you saw one that was sort of more true the direction that's going to push you in I can't tell you hopefully there's something in here though that helped to make your decision a big easier really you again can't go wrong because of these devices so today guys I am John render from TechnoBuffalo I'm here to check out the website for all your tech news and for exclusive content checking out of Twitter twitter.com slash John four Lakers and I will see you in the next video bye-bye you
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