Gadgetory

hey guys jon rettinger from technobuffalo here there are a lot of really good smartphones on the market right now running very different fully featured and capable operating systems I think two of the most interesting on the market right now the palm pre plus for verizon wireless and the HTC built-in nexus one also called the google phone which is unlocked can be run on t-mobile's 3g network or a tease edge the palm pre plus right now is going to set you back 149 bucks after two year contract and Mel and rebates nexus one runs anywhere from 5 29 unlocked about to 180 subsidized from t-mobile so this versus video we're going to cover a ton of categories but in the interest of brevity not making this an hour video some things we're going to have to be cut out we're going to cover specs browser keyboard navigation app stores notifications multitasking and a few intangibles as we go so let's talk about some of the more salient specs and the things that I think you need to know from a weight standpoint the palm pre plus you're looking at four point eight nine ounces the nexus one comes in at 4.59 a form factor you've got a slide-out qwerty keyboard on the palm pre plus and sort of that river rock look and feel the nexus one has that slate form factor very thin and all the typing is done on screen as we'll see in our typing test in just a minute so speaking of the screens the palm pre plus has a 320 x 480 resolution whereas the nexus one has a 480 x 800 resolution we really take advantage of all those pixels on its 3.7 inch screen let's go ahead and get to the test the first thing we're going to cover her browser is browsers quite a bit now is lead into my versus videos with a browser head-to-head so we're going to load technobuffalo calm on Wi-Fi both devices are on the same Wi-Fi network so there shouldn't be a difference in network speed here they're in a load site that has been put on here both so images have been cached so think of it as a real world test of a site that you visit on a regular basis so enough of me jibber jabbering let's go ahead and get started load them up on each okay well go ahead which is at the same time and get started so the palm pre has about a in the palm pre plus about a 600 megahertz processor compared to the one gigahertz Snapdragon processor the nexus one which is actually the fastest smartphone processor that's widely available to consumers and right here you can see the difference in speed nexus ones already done the palm pre plus just finishes a few seconds later and really all of my tests the nexus one especially on Wi-Fi comes in faster i think that should just due to the improved hardware let's take a look the browser both now feed your native multi-touch support the nexus one was endowed with that earlier in the week let's see how it works here you're famous pinch and zoom features and it goes very fast almost no delight as my fingers move up it adjusts itself accordingly you can double tap zoom out an area and of course landscape everything works there as well then rotate it back neither of these have native flash support so you're sort of looking at apples to apples type of comparison let's go back to the palm pre and one last thing i want to mention on the nexus one as i scroll I don't get any sort of checker pattern it can keep up with my finger scrolling and as I stop it'll sort have a physics engine that would keep it scrolling depending on how fast my fingers moving we'll take a look at things on the palm pre plus goes very fast but you get a little bit of a checkerboard pattern it goes away pretty quickly but it is there as far as multi-touch very quick there's a small delay between when your fingers sort of expand and come back but certainly not bad at all I mean you can definitely do the same sort of tapping features as far as multi-touch browsers go I think this is probably two of the three best on the market right now you can't go wrong with either these browsers are very full-featured however the faster processor on the nexus one makes browsing a little bit more enjoyable a bit more pleasurable because things do load much faster and you'll see that faster processor sort of take advantage of everything as we continue the tests but perhaps Wi-Fi was just an anomaly let's test these things on their known 3g network so we're going to test this on verizon's 3g and t-mobile 3g i'm going to turn off the camera and come back once I've turned Wi-Fi off all right so you've got Wi-Fi turned off on both of these I have three bars of verizon's 3g evdo and I coincidentally have three bars of t-mobile's 3g data so it should be a pretty fair tests go ahead and get started we're going to load the same page TechnoBuffalo calm and see how these things come about it's like I tapped the palm pre plus just a second later or something to definitely keep in mind as we check load speeds so looks like they're showing content adjust about the same time next is one almost done actually you can see the yellow bar across the top ok the nexus one is done and the palm pre plus is still going can see that sort of blue circle fill up and it's still going almost done I think this is again a result of the faster processor t-mobile's network speed at least test for test is not faster than verizon's network but the increased speed in the processor renders pages so much quicker I mean it looks like the network speed is so much faster because the processor and the palm pre plus is still loading so you can clearly see a difference in the browser speed i think that's equated exclusively to the beefy beefy Qualcomm Snapdragon processor the nexus one essentially the edge goes to the nexus one as far as the browser's multi-touch i think is a little bit better and loading speed let's go ahead and check out the keyboard how to input text on these things well they both do it in very different ways well collide open up a notes application or a sort of text entry on the palm pre plus and show you what the keyboard looks like all right opening up a memo application here okay so let's go ahead and zoom down so here we've got a blank memo on its onscreen qwerty keyboard and i will try typing this is a test and see how it works out and i have had this phone for a few weeks I've gotten relatively used to the keyboard when zoom out just a bit you can see me do this and let's get started this is a test campri accurate let's try one more word about palm pre so not bad i have gotten a little more accurate as i'm using it it is missing sort of a fully functional autocorrect which comes to be very annoying I've got relatively big fingers Kingston as I put them over one key sort of almost covers for it's definitely a usable chorded keyboard far as a physical one goes but it's not one of the best out there if you have very big fat fingers I tend to have a larger hands you may have some trouble typing on this I definitely recommend going in and giving it a shot the pixi I think has a little bit more usable keyboard we'll cover that in later video series so the moral being on the palm pre plus it's a usable physical keyboard but the operating system is missing some sort of rudimentary autocorrect features that i would like i also got used to double tapping on the space bar for a period there's a period button right next door to that to be it's personal preference in for me i miss it you might not but if I wants it to bring it to your attention let's take a look at the nexus one and see how that handles text entry that uses a a complete on-screen keyboard let's go ahead and open up say their memo application and we'll see how it looks open up a messaging open up a new message okay so this is of course a on-screen keyboard you can use it either landscape or portrait here is what the landscape keyboard looks like then rotate it off to the side ort it off to the other side and get a sense of what the portrait looks like we will try both and I'll start out typing this is a test and i'll write google nexus one just as i did with the last one i'll zoom out just a little bit senate make you guys blind you can see that the autocorrect immediately came into effect if i hit spacebar it you know will correct it so this is a cheat a bit accidental but the autocorrect came right in as far as other mistakes not completely accurate but not bad either if i want to double tap I do get that period let's try google nexus one so did some mistakes there nothing I think you'd have to get used to keyboard the keyboard I prefer actually I'm sorry to prefer the on-screen keyboard to split my in accuracy of the nexus one but the palm pre plus is a nice alternative go and turn it sideways and we'll keep typing I'll try it same thing one more time this is a test of the google nexus one so not so accurate there either big keyboard is lend itself to accuracy one interesting thing that this does have my demonstrated a previous video was another way to input text and that is text to speech to go ahead and hit that actually say what you want it to say and it will type it right in there it does do it pretty well this does have a spot on the keyboard actually meant for a smiley faces an emoticon throw and tap that and you can sort of pull up a list of them together yeah whatever you want happy sad whatever the rest of those things mean I'm you do have an option so I'm not going to call a winner here on this test can it go down to personal preference I was a bit more accurate on the pre pluses keyboard but I preferred the on-screen bigger keyboard of the nexus one so this one I'm going to call it a draw and I think you're gonna have to decide the winner depending on which one you like more so we're going to move on to navigation both these things handle navigation a bit differently it's take a look first at the palm pre plus so unlock it slide to unlock and we're here on the main home screen you might think that there's a lot of wasted space here you get a row of icons across the bottom that are customizable you can pull up the menu icon the launcher and you can scroll and see the different choices and you can move these around in any order that you like now there aren't really many physical buttons on the nexus one you have a gesture area right here on the initial around sorry on the palm pre on the initial palm pre that was a button that button is gone replaced a touch-sensitive led you can see it as I wave my finger over it saw light up and if you tap that that will bring up sort of your open windows I don't have any right now and it also serves as a gesture area for going back and forth and web pages or bringing up the quick launcher you can see right there let's go and open up a card I'll show you what it looks like we'll open up a web browser and will open up say Twitter application they can see right here this will handle multitasking me very well I can tap that open up Twitter and that'll go ahead and launch for me I'll handle both at the same time which really makes for a very enjoyable experience I'm a big fan of webos I think this handles multitasking probably better than any phone out there other than test run words had actually 50 programs open once they all work sort of very well and without many hiccups so if i want to go to the webpage i can just tap it if i want to go back to deck your cart feature go ahead and tap that button down below and i can navigate right on over to the deck cards now if i want to close something I just swipe it up and that is now closed in a lot of using system memory okay shut down everything same thing for phone whenever you like everything on the device is treated as its own card so you really have control over what you're using so let's take a look at navigation on the nexus one slides unlock seems to be a pretty standard theme so you get a bit more customization not say with the nexus one you've got five home screens go ahead and scroll over to all of them if you want to jump from one home screen to the next you can go ahead and tap on those buttons in the bottom left or right you get sort of a deck of cards feature that we saw on the palm pre pick the screen you want and you jump right back to it you're the ability to customize really anything you want on the home screen so I've got a widget right across the top that shows me my network connections if I tap and hold down I get pic other widgets and there are some some pretty good ones to choose from and you can download many many more from the android marketplace i'll go back you can put folders change your wallpapers to get these live wallpapers you can see in the background it's actually moving or you can put a contact directly onto the homescreen a navigation is done pretty much with your finger there is a trackball here I don't use that that much it's mostly flick scrolling pinching and zooming and that sort of thing for the navigation it is very smooth and a really nice seamless experience I personally enjoy sort of the fun of webos and be able to the ability to throw cards away and launch them but you know they both handle multitasking and let me show you how the nexus one handles that so if i go ahead and hold down the home button pulls up this bar of open applications so messaging is what i had open we're not sharing it a keyboard the browser we had during the last test I can jump to either one of those and I'll immediately be there and it handles multitask and quite nice doesn't Leo pin' as many as you want I believe it's got a limit of five applications but you can jump through and take things very easily go back to messaging and there I am without any sort of delay one thing that I don't like about navigation on this phone or these touch sensitive bottom buttons across the bottom they are not so accurate and don't respond very well to touch if I use sort of my finger and I tap they don't always work you have to serve sometimes hold it down to get it to function a little bit better it doesn't happen all the time but definitely as use the device you will notice it as I think a bit of an annoyance let's go ahead and move on to the app stores they both have the sort of own apt catalogs or app distribution centers the palm pre plus has an app catalog aren't many applications in it now as we speak but palm is really pushing heavy developers and developers incentives and of the launch of this on verizon wireless is now has two carriers getting a lot more interest from dev so you should see plenty more things on here it's got a pretty nice look and feel to it it's nice and smooth I'm running this again just over 3g network things you would expect to be on here Pandora Twitter clients messaging clients they're all here this can handle 3d gaming just as a nexus one can but sort of there's not that much available as far as content you can find some games where I say on the Android Marketplace you'd find 10 or 11 different applications that make you Twitter or if you're looking for on the palm pre and they're really a catalog you're going to find maybe one or two so of course android is has a fantastic app store we're going to open our up here called android marketplace you can go through and view just thousands and thousand thousands of applications the majority of which are free you have to pick serve App Store app store you're going to be hard pressed to be the android marketplace i'm going to put these two heads ahead just based on the bevy of free applications and the content that's available you know next year at this time Paul may very well caught up and it could be a drop but this one clearly has to go to Android and that's true of any Android device not just the nexus one so let's talk about notifications and how it handles notifications what they both do it very differently the nexus one for example and really all google phones have notifications up top via this notifications bar go ahead and pull that down see I've got you know a few emails right there and go and tap it and launch it for me I can swipe that up and then go away and I get notifications across the top and bottom right here on the palm pre plus your notifications that will show up right at the bottom let me show you what those look like ok so I'm a text message it just came through here and I've got that little icon in the bottom right now if I had a new email that would be an envelope and that'll show up really any where I am if I go ahead and tap it I'll tell me what it is so I've got that message from myself Jonathan rettinger I can tap it and view it or I can swipe it away and there were multiple notifications they would all sort of show up right there so i'll go ahead and swipe that away and it's gone i could go right up to the application if I it tapped it but I like the swiping a sort of a fun I turned of enjoyable experience from I don't know why it's very satisfactory to just swipe the thumb away and see it go so when it comes down to sort of the intangibles both devices this is where things get tricky I prefer web OS as an operating system but i prefer the hardware on the nexus one fat a pick one of these two devices to use on a daily basis I have to side with the nexus one I think that the processor really gives it an edge and almost everything that you do from browser speed looking at pictures to contact navigation to scrolling to everything it's just an edge solely based on processor if the palm pre plus had a bit faster processor and a little more horsepower I think would be a very easy decision for me to side with the palm pre pushes because I enjoy the operating system a bit more androids very full-featured I think I could use it every day and be pretty happy so this one again going to come down to your choice see where you get reception for both if you get good reception for either I'd be hard pressed and not recommend the nexus one which coincidentally will be coming to verizon in the coming months so if you're holding out for a new phone you might want to try to pulled out just a bit longer and I know it's got a bit long-winded to thank you for sticking with me I am jon rettinger from TechnoBuffalo with a head-to-head comparison video for you of the palm pre plus and the google nexus one i'll see you in the next video bye bye