Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minim infront pocketnow.com if you're looking for a new Android phone you're undoubtedly looking at the Nexus 4 and the Droid DNA and in this video we're going to compare them both let's get to it okay so we're gonna talk about the hardware on both of these devices and then compare them but first let's take the DNA now the DNA is on Verizon right now over LTE although you can put an AT&T SIM card in it and get HSPA+ data speeds in fact that's what I've been running on and it works just fine over 80 which is really interesting actually this phone is going to be released within the next six months on every major carrier and in Europe because this is HTC's Fang for the next six months this is their high-end phone and the DNA the deluxe whatever you want to call it is deserving of that title this thing is a beast and it's it's truly unique in that in the fact that it has a 1080p screen it's the first smartphone with a 1080p it's got the s4 pro quad core so it's fast if we're gonna get to that intimate but let's take a look at this design what Verizon and HTC has done here we've got these red elements all throughout we've got the speaker grille up here which has this interesting interesting perforated look to it behind the grille we've got a massive front facing camera it's not super high resolution or anything it's got a wide angle but it just looks huge compared to other front-facing cameras we've got this tapered edge look kind of a common design language that a lot of manufacturers are using we've got capacitive buttons on the bottom and Gorilla Glass too so it's a little bit more slippery than the last generation Gorilla Glass around the edges we've got these really awesome details the Verizon red and it looks like there's a speaker behind there because they're perforated metal panels but actually it's just for design on the top of the power button is interestingly placed in the top centre which is definitely annoying they should have placed on the side HDC usually places it right here but that's where the sim and the power button has this awesome design to it if you move it in a light it's gotta this radio cutout design which is carried over to the volume rocker here not just the standard piece of plastic for the volume rocker you get this nice little itched look to it the red accent continues on the sides on the back to the camera now the bank has soft touch plastic which is really important for this phone because it's tall it's not a phablet because it's not intended to take the place of a tablet like the note 2 mic for example it's very much a phone it's a long bar phone and so having soft touch on the back makes it feel really nice and hand it really feels secure and the fact that these tapered edges come to the end here makes the phone feel a lot thinner than it is it's actually thicker than the nexus 4 but it feels thinner because of this nice sharp edge here which is probably about 6 millimeters thick but then the entire phone if you look at it from the side is nine point seven millimeters thick so that is the Troi DNA really nice design something new and fresh which is nice to see here on the Nexus 4 designed by LG it shares design language with the Optimus G of course we have a buttonless design here and we've got a nice bezel on the bottom which you can use to hold the phone from we've got an LED notification light and should mention that the droid DNA here as a notification light here on the front and also here on the back the Nexus 4 actually is a multicolor notification LED which can show a ton of different colors if you use light flow so far it looks like the DNA only has green and yellow and and red really and not like blue and amber and all those other colors that you can do on the Nexus 4 the Nexus 4 is a little bit thinner than the Droid DNA but it feels a little bit thicker because the edge is the same thickness as the entire phone so it kind of goes all the way back we've got a really cool design that women here on the Nexus 4 or something totally unique just this just thousands of little circles that shimmer in the light when you twist it let me bring the light a little bit closer and you can kind of see whew that's fun very nice and we've got soft touch around the edges here and it feels okay in the head it doesn't feel as good as the droid DNA perhaps because this plastic has an interesting contrast with all of this glass it makes it feel a little bit cheap like the edges should have been a higher quality material maybe metal for example wears on the droid DNA you get glass and the rest is just soft touch plastic so it feels nice in the hand another thing about the Nexus 4 is that it slides so easily the Droid DNA swivels easily but because it's rubbery on the back it's gonna stay in your pocket more easily and it's not going to jump off of the table like you might see with the Nexus 4 now the screens are very different and yet they're not that different in terms of size we have a 5-inch 1080p that's 1920 by 1080 making for a pixel density of 440 that's huge here on the Nexus 4 we have a more reasonable 4.7 inch display 1280 down by seven six eight across still a high PPI of 320 now because of the bigger screen here the the Droid DNA is a little bit a little bit wider it's significantly taller there by about an inch and of course as mentioned with thickness the Droid DNA is a little bit thicker if we put it on a table it's nine point seven millimeters versus nine point one millimeters all right now let's turn on these guys and while they're turning on we're going to talk about specs so we turn them on over here and here let's see which turns on faster go they're both starting up so both of these devices have very similar specifications we both they both share the Qualcomm s4 pro quad core Wow looks like we were first here on the Droid DNA and to continue the thought here we've got the s4 pro quad core snapdragon on both devices they both have two gigabytes of RAM and they both have similar storage situations so on the droid DNA we have your choice of 16 gigabytes and 16 gigabytes you don't have any other choice on the nexus 4 you get either 8 or 16 gigabytes neither device has expandable storage so choose your storage wisely now of course when you get 16 gigabytes of storage you don't actually get 16 gigabytes of storage on the Troy DNA or 16 gigabytes of storage means 11 gigabytes use of usable and here on the nexus 4 8 gigabytes gives you about 6 usable and 16 gigs of gigabytes gives you about 14 usable so that's something to keep in mind you're gonna get a little extra space here if you go with this Steen gigabyte model now what we're gonna do is test app launch speed and then we're gonna compare the screens when I do benchmarks you're definitely gonna want to stick around first thing I want to do here is actually turn on brightness all the way so that you can tell the difference between the screens see which one is more bright perhaps go to brightness turn off auto brightness check that bad boy yeah we've got a super LCD free screen here kind of the successor to the LCD super LCD to of the One X and we've got LG's IPS display here both of these displays are awesome actually let's take a look at viewing angles so we're gonna turn both of them to the side at the same degree and you can kind of be the judge both of them have really I mean you could still see the screens it's pretty incredible both of them have extremely good viewing angles and we're gonna see what the 1080p resolution means in a wide variety of cases okay let's test app launch speed we're gonna start off with Facebook here we're both over the same Wi-Fi network one two three and by the way something to note here look at the Facebook icon here on the DNA versus the Nexus 4 it's more blue more saturated on the DNA as you can see there compared to the Nexus 4 so just pointing out some things along the way here let's launch Facebook one two three go faster on the Nexus 4 let's launch Twitter so go back into social folder one two three Twitter faster on the Nexus 4 next thing we're going to do is launch the Play Store one two three placed over about the same there next thing we are going to do is launch bad piggies we can find it bad piggies HD to be exact go wow exactly at the same time now what you're dealing with here is obviously similar hardware so what you're gonna get is the droid DNA being a little bit slower most of the time just because it has so many more pixels than the Nexus 4 another thing we're in a launch now is the calorie down here one two three say she's exactly at the same time let's do that again the camera is always way first vote takes a little bit longer one two three camera okay interesting now that we have the same amount of programs in memory let's check free RAM let's see how both of these devices do in terms of RAM utilization so we're gonna go to apps here running and running and so we've got one point five gigabytes usable instead of two and we're using about 885 of it and down here we're using far less Ram which is really interesting have the same 1.5 gigabytes free HTC sense man just takes up a lot of RAM and that's probably what's happening here we have about 50 percent RAM available here and we've got like 75 percent available on the nexus 4 what are the benefits of having stock Android on the nexus 4 is that you don't have to worry about sense or TouchWiz or whatever interface you're thinking about to slow you down these also have different multitask UI's so we're gonna hit this button and see which opens the multitask UI first 1 2 3 multitask that was about at the same time HDC HDC is still going with their really 3d ask multitask UI we kind of wish you see we just go with the stock Android multitask UI if it's not fixed if it's not what is that if it's not broken don't fix it alright so in terms of app launch speed the nexus 4 is the winner there next we're going to go into the web now in our review we complain that the Nexus 4 is chrome built in as the stock browser and we still feel that way this stock Android browser is faster than chrome period in every case so I'll be interesting to see how these two devices compare what we're gonna do is launch pocket now right off the bat we've got some tabs open it's gonna close those all right and the DNA went to the mobile site let's go to the desktop version really curious to see how the display difference really curious to see how the display differs here because we get so many more pixels on the DNA and look at this here on the nexus 4 we can see down to this story here and that's where this story is here so we get an additional almost two stories here on the DNA another thing that's really striking about the DNA is from this zoomed out view you can read this text more than ever let me show you you can still do it on the nexus 4 but you're you're getting to the limit of the screens ability to show you really small text so can you read that text probably but from the TNA it's it's another it's in another realm okay so let's test out pinch to zoom okay we're in a pinch to zoom and did you notice that if I pinch the exact same amount on the Nexus 4 Izu min less the screen sensitivity is is worse on the Nexus 4 it's it's it's got a problem because of this in cell touch so watch me pinch the same amount I'm actually I'm actually pinch I've actually pinched a more on the nexus 4 and it's just not as responsive so let's zoom back out we're gonna double tap to zoom in see which clears up faster about equal there and let's zoom back out to move down the page see if we get any whitespace very smooth there very smooth there as well okay so let's move on around the page pick a story let's pick this one here and we are going to click on that 1 2 3 go the exact same time let's see what she gets there first watching the progress bar the progress bar and and DNA finish first we're gonna stop the Nexus for here you've got a little pop-up here we don't know if that and we're going to scroll down to this embedded video see which renders it faster one two three go faster on the Nexus 4 ok so let's go back to the home screen let's go to another website this time where you are going to go to the verge one two three go again the mobile site on the DNA here we're go to the full site and see again the displayed differences and by the way what you can tell here by this white screen is that the DNA screen is cooler than the nexus 4 and we found that in all of our comparisons video with the videos with the Nexus 4 the Nexus 4 is a warm screen for better or for worse so here up the bet you can see a lot more screen contents here on the DNA let's go into landscape and see what the story is there and interestingly in landscape you see more on the Nexus 4 than you do on the DNA but of course you can probably tweak the zoom settings on either of these device to get a desired effect so let's move down on the page nice and smooth there some miss presses are always always fun a little bit of white there alright let's zoom in on this area and see which clears up text faster having problems here on the Nexus 4 one two three actually the DNA was a little bit slower in that case so it seems that generally speaking the Nexus 4 is a little bit faster than the DNA in some cases it's really a draw in case of web browsing performance and that kind of make sense they have the same processor and then the DNA has more pixels to push while the Nexus 4 has the Chrome browser which should it be the default browser so about equal we'll call it now let's take a look at YouTube all right so we've got the same video at the top you were gonna click on both now something's a note about the DNA in YouTube the YouTube app in Android only does 720p video so you're not going to see the full resolution but what happens is that there's some pixel doubling happening in YouTube on the DNA which isn't bad so you get a 720p picture stretched to more pixels it really doesn't make a difference will you be the judge so I'm gonna click on this video and it's going to play here get a little advertisement in and you know it definitely does look better on the DNA we get a a slightly larger view but in terms of the colors they look about the same here again a little bit warmer on the nexus floor we're gonna go back to the home screen and do some benchmark tests by the way guys if you're wondering what this live wallpaper is it's it's a free live wallpaper super cool it's called light grading you can customize the colors and the shapes it's a lot of fun and it really makes any high quality display shine although interestingly it's having trouble a little bit on the DNA it's a little bit slower and it's definitely much smoother here on the Nexus 4 all right let's run quadrants alright we're gonna run the benchmark and come back with the scores and the DNA finished first and let's see what the results say so we've got seven thousand eight hundred and thirty three on the DNA which smokes the Nexus 4 here and these these results around forty seven hundred and four thousands is what we've been seeing on the Nexus 4 but this is an impressive score here on the Droid DNA now let's run another benchmark geek bench too and we'll be back with the scores okay the results are in and it looks like the Nexus 4 was a little bit faster and Geekbench by about 800 points or so so in conclusion the Nexus 4 is definitely a bit faster than the Droid DNA which makes sense because the DNA has more pixels to push that said those pixels are beautiful this screen is unbelievable 440 PPI might be overkill but when you're looking at pictures and looking at text on the screen it is just a wonder to think about how they included so many pixels on this display one thing to consider with the DNA though is in hand comfort it feels good in the hand because of the really high build quality from HTC but the screen is tall so even if you have basketball player sized hands you're gonna have to take out your second hand just to turn the device on and off because that power buttons all the way up at the top with the Nexus 4 you get stock unadulterated Android the way nature intended that's something to consider definitely for the power user crowd more so than the DNA and you also have to consider that the hardware on the Nexus 4 isn't as good as a DNA it just feels a little cheaper in the hand and of course we have those touch responsiveness issues which makes the screen feel numb on the Nexus 4 but the Nexus 4 has an awesome price at 300 bucks starting if you're buying it off contract so both of these devices are really awesome some advice to you is to wait for the DNA to to come on more carriers test it out at your local carrier store you'll be able to get it at a subsidized price presumably and it'll bring the price around to where you can get the the Nexus 4 maybe even a little bit lower both of these devices deserve your consideration if there's anything specific you want us to compare drop us a comment and if you like this video give us a thumbs up thanks for watching that's it for now