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Browser Wars: Zune HD v. iPod Touch

2009-09-21
as its brand a minimun from TechnoBuffalo and in this video we're going to take a look at the internet browsing experience of the iPod Touch 3rd generation compared to the new Zune HD so let's launch the internet browsers on both on the Zune HD it's simply called Internet on a tap on that and go to Safari on the iPod Touch now what you're going to notice right off the bat is that the Zune HD actually makes a really good use of screen space so the only buttons that occur happen on the bottom strip so we have a favourites button that allow you to go to a variety of favourites or add a new favorite we have a back button that's dimmed out right now we can search although it only uses Bing to search you can't change your search provider and then we can tap on the little strip to bring up the address bar and we can use the really interesting keyboard here and we're going to go through that in a second to type a URL whereas on the iPod touch you have a lot more screen space being used by system elements such as the notification bar at the top and the address bar in the top of Safari and the whole button bar along the bottom when you're on a mobile device screen space is at a premium and I really like how the Zune HD has made really good use of the limited screen space that it has ok so let's see which which web browser is faster in loading Engadget so here we go one two three looks like the iPod Touch is almost done and here comes the Zune HD the iPod Touch is finished the Zune HD is not done yet the Zune HD is a little bit slower it's still not done I'm actually surprised at how long it's taking but let's see how it is rendered various elements on the page I know it's tough to see here but the the OLED screen on the Zune HD makes for a very very sharp and clear picture and the colors are just super vivid let's take a look at screen rotation speed well zoom out a little bit to do that screen rotation speed on the Zune HD is rocket fast much faster than the iPod touch and you get the point let's take a look at how these devices resize columns when you double tap to zoom in so I see some text underneath of this picture of a phone and I'm going to do likewise over here so double tap okay resized it quite well double tap resized it quite well although it's much easier to read on the ipod touch still flick down to see how fast it redraws the screen redraws the screen a little bit faster on the ipod touch although I think that's because the flick is taking it down not as far the Zune HD lets you go a little bit further there about pretty much equal of course the Zune HD has a capacitive screen so it has multi-touch you can zoom in like so and of course you can do that with the iPod touch and let's click on something else thank you looks like the soon HD didn't even register that screen press there goes and it's almost done it looks like it's still loading but we can use the page now so double tap to zoom in double tap to zoom in again the text on the iPod Touch is more readable I think that's attributed to it having a wider resolution 320 across vs. 272 pixels across so let's take a look at how it renders another webpage let's do Amazon so go down here Amazon go into the favorites list and here I'm gonna do at the same time here we go the ipod touch finished about two seconds before the Zune HD the Zune HD actually remembered where I was last time on the page I was actually on this page earlier and I was in the upper left corner view these in landscape now something that the Zune HD can't do that the iPod Touch can do is have multiple screens multiple tabs open at one time so obviously with the iPod Touch you can add a new page and go to a different website you can't do that on the Zune HD they want you to look at one web page at a time which kind of makes sense it's a very multi media centric device it's not trying to be an awesome amazing internet browsing device so let's see what it's like to enter a URL upon these in HD let's talk about the keyboard so let's say we want to go to is modem so GI z mo do very easy to use keyboard unfortunately it does not work in landscape now unfortunately by default the Zune HD loads the mobile version the watered-down version of web sites and a lot of websites these days have mobile versions they're basically like RSS feeds they just give you the headline sometimes a little bit of text you don't get the full experience there is no way to turn this off unfortunately except for finding where it says click here to view the classic Gizmodo most mobile web sites have a link right to that to the desktop version of the site and here Gizmodo is coming through quite slow so HD doesn't have flash support just like the iPod Touch so you're not gonna be able to watch hulu movies or even youtube and it's about done loading here something I found really annoying about the Zune HD - problems of the internet browser one when you go back into the internet browser it has to reload the page completely it doesn't store it in memory like the iPod Touch and show you the last website you were looking at number two getting out of the web browser is slow not sure it's gonna do it here but I'm gonna go to the home screen and we get a blank screen for a good four five seconds which is kind of a long time to get out of a program hopefully in future ROM updates this will get a little bit faster and finally there are some settings for the web browser let's go down to settings not that many though go to Internet we can delete history if you don't want people to know where you've been you can have cookies enabled and script enabled or disabled I'm I'm assuming that turning it off would make the browser a little bit faster so overall the Zune HD s web browser is quite good it features extremely fast screen rotation really good rendering fidelity with multi-touch and the screen makes the colors really pop the OLED screen that also is a very minimal interface that helps to really make good use of the limited screen space that is characteristic of a mobile device that said it's not as fast as the iPod Touch in terms of loading the page it doesn't let you have multiple tabs open at one time and also the shutdown and the time it takes to turn on the web browser open the web browser is a bit too long hopefully we'll see refinements on these issues in future roms and future versions of the Zune for now it's pretty darn good to start that's it for now
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