Gadgetory


All Cool Mind-blowing Gadgets You Love in One Place

Samsung Focus vs. HTC Thunderbolt

2011-03-23
hey guys it's bran the minimun from pocket now calm and in this video we're going to compare the HTC Thunderbolt with the Samsung Focus running on Windows Phone 7 let's get to it so previously we had compared the HTC Thunderbolt with the iphone 4 and with the inspire 4G will put up links on the video right now so that you can jump back to those videos or if you want to watch this video all the way through you'll see links at the end of the video as well if you want to see the other comparisons again our reason for comparing all of these devices is to help you make decisions we know it can be confusing there are a lot of smartphone choices and hopefully we're helping to make it a little bit easier as all of these new phones are coming out okay so let's talk about these devices the samsung focus here is kind of representing all of a tease windows phone 7 devices because at the end of the day they operate about the same they have the same specs so the other devices on ATT that you can choose from are the HTC surround you've got the LG quantum and now you've got the HTC hd7 s which is the t mobile hd7 but with a super LCD screen and of course on ATT it's coming out later this spring we don't know anything about pricing although it's probably going to be about ninety nine dollars maybe one hundred and forty nine dollars speaking of pricing let's compare these devices in terms of pricing the Thunderbolt is definitely more expensive than the focus it's two hundred and forty nine dollars whereas the samsung focus is ninety nine dollars pretty inexpensive their comparatively for data plans on the Samsung Focus you can opt for the twenty five dollar per month two gigabyte data plan with the Thunderbolt you can pay thirty dollars and get unlimited data and of course the Thunderbolt is rocking the 4g LTE modem so you'll get much faster data speeds about three to five times faster maybe even more than that in optimal conditions so if you want the fastest in data speeds a thunderbolt is no one to go with although the samsung focus is the more economical route okay so let's talk a little bit about hardware the screen on the Thunderbolt is 4.8 three inches diagonal which will be the same size as the coming hd7 s on the focus you get a smaller screen four inches but it's super amoled meaning that the contrast is really really good as we're going to see when we turn these on and start comparing one screen to the other now inside the focus has 512 megabytes of RAM the Thunderbolt has 768 megabytes of RAM both have a 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor we're going to see again how they compare day to day operation once we turn them on the focus is much much much thinner than the Thunderbolt it's probably half as thin or at least it looks half as then and on the back here we've got an eight megapixel camera over here on the Thunderbolt and a five megapixel camera on the focus both are capable of 720p video both take really good photos and really good video now with the focus you get the dedicated camera button which is very very handy and of course you get that windows phone 7 feature where even if the device is turned off or in standby if you tap and hold on the camera button it will turn on the camera and there is the camera so that's a really cool feature of Windows Phone 7 the Thunderbolt doesn't have that because well it's not a feature of android the Thunderbolt doesn't even have a button on the side for the camera which is kind of annoying but some people probably find it to be no big deal at all alright so of course the Thunderbolt has a front facing camera no camera on front facing camera on the focus windows phone 7 doesn't yet support front-facing cameras so let's turn on both of these devices and talk a little bit about the software we're kind of comparing apples to oranges here they're totally different in terms of the interface paradigm but we're going to do our best to try to compare them here so let's unlock the screen there unlock the screen here so the home screens are vastly different on Android you scroll side to side you get live widgets over on Windows Phone 7 you get these tiles and these tiles can show you information like the email count counter and if you have the calendar widget it will sugar the widget the live tile is they caught it will show you information but in terms of home screen versatility Android definitely takes the cake in that respect although if you want something simple and very clean and just knowing sense you may really enjoy what Windows Phone 7 has to offer now right off the bat you can see how how sharp the contrast is on the focus I mean look at the blacks on the side there the blacks are true black and they just look fantastic okay so on Windows Phone 7 to access your program try you swipe to the right over on an android of course you hit the application trail you get this big listing which is sortable windows phone 7 is a little bit more cumbersome to navigate because you get this really long list of applications that really is just sorted alphabetically you can't sort it by date or anything like that on the Thunderbolt and an Android in particular the sentence interface you can sort these by date alphabetical or by oldest which is kind of handy when you've got lots and lots of apps in terms of apps right now Windows Phone 7 has about let's jump in the marketplace real quick has about 10,000 apps and Android has about 150,000 apps so you definitely get a more mature app marketplace on Android although of course windows phone 7 is getting better each day they're starting to hit all of the the sort of basics like New York Times amazon and that's really what's important some of the off-the-cuff apps aren't as important because there's a lot of those in the android market which really helps to almost artificially boost the number of applications in the market most people are concerned with the major apps like pandora I'm New York Times amazon as we talked about and both of these devices have that covered so very very strong marketplaces on both again Android has a higher number let's go back to the home screens let's compare web browsers we're going to bounce into the browser we're just going to load pocket now right away here we've got a live tile or a tile on the home screen so let's stop this and go to pocket now we'll do a speed test and see how they compare now right now you can tell the big difference between super LCD and super amoled super is a very popular work we've got very white whites here dark blacks over here on the super LC scream the whites are almost milky in color it's not that crisp and clear by itself the Thunderbolt has a great screen but when you put it up against a super amoled screen the story kind of changes okay so let's scroll down let's zoom in very smooth scrolling and panning on both of them let's go to the desktop version both of these are over the same Wi-Fi network let's see which gets there first ok so the Thunderbolt finished first and Windows Phone 7 is lagging a little bit which is surprising because Windows Phone 7 is one of the best browsers and with the mango update of Windows Phone 7 coming later this year they're going to bump it up to ie9 which should have an even faster rendering engine so kind of slow there we're just going to stop it there obviously the focus loss let's do a speed test in terms of rotating the screen ok so definitely the Thunderbolt beat the focus and the other way that was perfectly tied again the Thunderbolt one in the landscape and in portrait that are pretty much tied that's kind of interesting ok let's a double tap to zoom in double tap to zoom in both are again very very very smooth and here's another video we did the inspire 4G versus the Thunderbolt so let's tap on that see which gets there faster of course you'll get flash elements in android whereas in in Windows Phone 7 you don't get flash at all you don't get silver like you really don't get some of those major web technologies so you'll see down here there's a little green arrow which means that if I tap on that that will load the youtube video and well actually oh yeah I thought there might have been a plug in here but it says you will need to upgrade your adobe flash player the pinch to zoom is just so buttery smooth on Windows Phone 7 it's really remarkable it beats even the iPhone in terms of just refinement of moving in on a particular element on the on the web page and let's zoom all the way out and let it continue to load it's still loading let's go to another website let's go to engadget to see how we do with checkerboards would end gadget because that's a particularly long web page now in terms of on-screen keyboards you can compare them right here windows phone 7 is one of the best on-screen keyboards but then again android is no slouch either this is htc's sense keyboard which has big letters you can change it to the t9 style you can change it to the short type style a lot of choices there if you like choice androids better if you don't mind giving what you've been got that the make any sense if you don't mind getting what you've been given windows phone 7 is the one for you because you can't change the keyboard okay so let's get engadget going on both of these devices dot-com got it right here let's try to get the same time perfect okay so they're off and gadgets a very long page so we're going to do the the flick test to see which loads faster so that actually went right to the desktop version or enough to change that went to the mobile versions we could go to the desktop and here we go it's going to load it up it's pretty amazing how far web browsers have come just in two or three years it used to be that there are lots of scroll bars it was difficult to see things but now it's almost like browsing a web page on the desktop so again it's finishing the loading process here on the samsung focus and again we want to stop this it's just it's taking too long in the last few seconds so let's do the flick scroll test going to try to hold the device steady and move very quickly down the page ok it's blankets blankets filling in as I go down okay so a little bit of checkerboards what probably has happened is that it's now cached and so if I do it again it should be better really fast maybe not okay so we get some of that blank spot although as you just saw it filled in let's try it out on the on the Thunderbolt here let's move that aside let's flick down the page okay so no checkerboards whatsoever we'll do it again very smooth on Windows Phone 7 the first or second time through you get some of that blank space as it tries to sort of catch up with the speed so over on web browse and we'll say that the Thunderbolt is definitely faster if you're really looking for a phone that browses the web as fast as possible now in terms of data speeds if you get out there you're you're driving your car somewhere or here you're on the bus or what have you the Thunderbolt if you're in a 4g area will get much faster data speeds in terms of numbers we're looking at between seven and ten megabits per second down the upload speed we're not really sure of because the testing mechanisms that we're using are giving us crazy results we're getting like 30 up which doesn't make sense we'll say it's probably about half the download speed so you're gonna get three to four to five megabits per second up on the samsung focus on ATT 3g network you're going to get about two point five megabits per second down which is not bad at all and 1.7 megabits per second up another thing to consider here is that you cannot tether right now with Windows Phone 7 but you can with the Thunderbolt now there's a tethering plan that you have to pay for it's about twenty dollars per month which only applies in this situation to the Thunderbolt so if you're looking for a device that will allow you to share the internet connection with several different devices your iPad your laptop the Thunderbolt is the one to go for and finishing things up here maybe navigation is very important to you maybe the maps application so we're going to jump into the maps application on both of these devices and just see how they compare in terms of general performance so we're going to wait for location here that is not where I am this is no mount a bunch okay so we've got the approximate location here and let's turn off aerial view so we can kind of get a similar sort of view and let's clear the map good okay so let's move around let's go up to New York City you can kind of see these in real time as I move around zoom out so we're using Bing Maps over here google maps over here of course you'll get the same big maps on every Windows Phone 7 you'll get the same google maps on every android so really this is just taking kind of a look at at the google maps at the different mapping application so let's go into New York so we've got sort of a different style of matte purple roads here you can kind of see how long it takes for it to clear up Google Maps is now vector based so things show up a little bit faster then you would expect on an older sort of mapping application this Bing Maps is not vector based its kind of based on little images that have to load but if you're a fast Wi-Fi network that's okay so if we zoom in a lot here on the Google application you're going to see buildings pop up if I'm on the right spot yep there I am buildings papa very cool that doesn't happen in bing maps and then you can do the two finger tilt and the pivot this is probably one of the coolest things that Google has done which will really let you navigate and be very precise when trying to find your way bing maps looks a little bit archaic in that respect when you get really close it automatically turns into aerial view and you zoom out a little bit obviously two fingers doesn't do anything but it's very smooth it's very capable it certainly lets you find the nearest starbucks or the nearest Burger King whatever you happen to be looking for so in terms of mapping applications the default built-in mapping applications the HTC Thunderbolt excels in this area and if you get out there if you're in New York City where they have 4G and you're moving around on the map things are going to load super fast because you're going to be over that 4G LTE network whereas on the focus here running on the 1880s 3g network things might be slower in that respect so hopefully this video was helpful if you're looking at a windows phone 7 device versus an HTC Thunderbolt or an Android device obviously there is a lot more we could compare we just wanted to do sort of an overview about pricing and hardware and software to give you a little bit more information again we've also compared the HTC Thunderbolt with the iphone and with the inspire 4G the links should be up on the video right now so you can jump to those if you want if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and thank you for watching that's it for now
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.