Gadgetory

hey guys jon rettinger from technobuffalo here smartphones are all the rage this holiday season and Sprint's has two of the arguably hottest ones available right now the palm pixi and the HTC hero so that'll do a little head-to-head action and go through a few categories that i think are the most important you can see which one is going to be best for you so there are a ton of categories that we can cover obviously but I picked the ones that I felt were most important so we're going to cover price we're going to cover internet on some off brake system overviews the camera youtube and keyboard and a few other sort of random specs along the way so let's start with the devices themselves the pixi comes in at 3.51 ounces and the hero comes in at 4.5 so there's a difference there weight-wise but not much both are extremely small and pocketable devices screen resolution on the pixi you're going to get 320 x 480 so you're going to get 80 extra pixels on the hero camera wise the picture is going to give you a 2 megapixel resolution whereas the hero is going to give you five seriously are getting better picture quality and that's all that in all my tests as well from price standpoint though the pixie is definitely a little bit less money it's coming in at 99 bucks on a two-year contract and the hero is going to run you eighty dollars more at just about 179 99 just something to keep in mind they all have bluetooth where the big different specs wise common is in Wi-Fi expandable media the pixi does not have Wi-Fi and does not have an expandable memory card slot you're limited to just the internal storage but i believe is 4 gigs the hero on the other hand does have Wi-Fi and also has a micro SD card slot so you can go all the way up to 32 gigs both are course evdo rev a phones which means full 3g let's get into the actual phone itself and stop talking about spec to show you some things that you can see so what I use most on a phone is the Internet I do a lot of razzing and do a lot of my work from my mobile device so having a good internet browser is very important to me both phones have capacitive touchscreens and support multitouch so i want to show you how this looks the pixie is running palms web OS whereas a hero is running a custom skin to version of Android 1.5 which is called sin see why I did a full overview of sense UI in a previous video so let's unlock both devices you can see the unlocks prints here here it is on the pic Singh to unlock you just slide it up it gets you had notifications down there for an email and you can just slide that off to the side let's unlock the hero and you just slide the screen down to unlock and right here you can definitely see the size of the screen there clearly is a difference the pixie has a full physical QWERTY keyboard we'll talk about it in a minute and the hero relies on an on-screen keyboard so I've turned Wi-Fi off on the hero to make this a fair comparison I'll do another test to show you with Wi-Fi on Casey really curious to what the difference is going to be so we will load up technobuffalo calm on each of these open up the browser I'll type it in the accelerometer kicked in right then okay this website has been loaded on both of these that will simulate a test of a site that you visit on a regular basis I will do the same thing here on the hero okay so I've got them queued up here and ready to go we're going to load them on each and again this is just a test of the same evdo rev a networking exactly the same location with exactly the same amount of bars of service which is five bars so I'll see how both of these phones fair go ahead and launch about the same time all right and they are both off and I'll show you after these load how the multi-touch gestures work and how the browser looks overall on how it renders looks like the pixi jumped out to a bit of an early lead the hero cut up gets you the progress bar right there is a blue circle and the green progress bar right there along the bottom so both are almost done and promised every processor was these two are very close so it looks like the hero just finished and the pixie is still going like everything sort of popping up there it takes you still going so while the pixie is still loading all you can still read now to get the page just finished I'll show you what the browser looks like on the hero first so scrolling is very smooth and both these are based on webkit you may have heard that essentially it's just a foundation an open source foundation for building a mobile browser and lets you view pages in full HTML Lori so you can navigate very smoothly a finger scrolling if you want to zoom in so I want to read this text for example I can just double tap and I'll zoom and it wont sort of scale the text so well but it will sort of bring it into the window and I was like I mentioned before this both support multitouch I can take two fingers and I can zoom in and out see it doesn't it's not so smooth on the hero it works and use it in pictures as well but it's not as smooth as you'd see on the iphone for example can zoom out it's definitely functioning and it's usable but it's not the most smooth thing one of the things that I always check when I view mobile browsers is how the processor handles quick page loads so if you're trying to flick through a page very quickly sometimes you can get a checkerboard pattern at the bottom so let's see if the hero does that stuff in the hero brought the page back up to the top and bottom as quickly as I could scroll and you can see that technobuffalo here does look like just as it would look on your desktop browser oh this is a very very capable browser you can see that flash is not supported right there you can clearly see the big f with the ! through it so if you're looking for a good browser the hero is probably one of the best of course an accelerometer and you can navigate the page in landscape as well it looks great it's very easily navigate and the multi-touch is definitely a nice add-on and eyewitness here to rely on it see right there it's not even I've been working so let's take a look at the pic so you can see how their browser looks something that's definitely a smaller screen but certainly a very usable browsing experience so it's a little bit on the small side let's take a look at multi-touch that was what we took a look at first on the hero buttery smooth you can deftly the difference in how much quickly multi-touch works for this and I may have something to do with palms operating system and particularly palms browser natively being built to support multitouch Android right out of the box does not support it something HTC added so that may be a reason why just work so well works just as well it does on the iPhone or really any other multi-touch before device it's really really smooth I want to zoom in like I said I can quartz multi-touch or I can double tap on some text and that does bring it right up into view and this does have an accelerometer as well so you can view this in portrait and rotation speed is very quick let's check out the scrolling and see if it's quick enough to keep up with what we want that get that checkerboard pattern and there is a checkerboard pattern but it goes away pretty quickly certainly one of the knocks on the pixie has been it's a bit of an anemic processor that certainly been something that's hindering the hero as well and you can sort of see that in effect here in little things like the browser it's a very capable browser I think that palms browser is absolutely rivals the best browser on the market which in my opinion is definitely the iphones mobile safari palms browser is just as good just as full-featured and more importantly flash support will be coming swiftly another 2010 so from a browser standpoint it's going to really come down to size of the screen and personal preference or the multi-touch is important to you or not or whether you want a bigger screen both are extremely capable and really useful browsing and i was able to do everything i would normally do on a typical browser on both devices hope you guys found that helpful now before i mention this in previous videos may sound a little bit weird before i go to bed and i like to watch some youtube videos generally I'll watch you know what's most popular for the day and sort to see what was going on both of these have native YouTube support and also give you a chance to see how them both of them handle video so let me go ahead and open up the YouTube browsers on each but before I do that I want to give you a demonstration also of the Wi-Fi difference on the browser between both operates since the hero has Wi-Fi the pixie doesn't and for looking to compare both devices sort of apples to apples definitely something to know that there is Wi-Fi support it so I'm going to do just a very quick load speed test with Wi-Fi turned on on the hero alright so Wi-Fi has been kicked on on the hero we got technobuffalo queued up to reload and let's see how quickly both of these handle them so the hero was noticeably faster you went out Wi-Fi so I assume this is going to be a blowout with Wi-Fi but we'll see you never know how how things are going to load the green bar the hero is almost already done and the pixie looks to be about three quarters of the way done and I'm running on any relatively quick Wi-Fi network and the hero supports if you're wondering a B&G Wi-Fi it's all done on the hero and still loading on the pixi so not surprising anyone it's a much faster experience over Wi-Fi so like I mentioned let's take a look at YouTube very quickly I don't want this to get to be a 30-minute video but you can see the pixies still loading the site and the hero was done quite a bit ago one of the cool things about the pre I should mention on webos is the deck of cards features how you can handle multi applications and the way you handle multitasking to get rivet application I just throw it off the screen and it's gone let's take a look at youtube here this you can see very quickly what the load times are going to be over a pretty strong 3g signal so pick the the first video here just you can see what the player natively looks like and it does play in landscape as do all videos on the pre and since again is this 3g there's a little bit of buffer time the quality is not as crisp and clear as you would expect but the speaker is pretty loud on the prey which is a nice addition it's a very simplistic design some sort of a causal um it doesn't load that slowly it's much faster than i would have expected it to be quality is pretty clear even over 3g let's take a look at experience on the hero and again I know I'm running through these a little bit quickly there's just so much to show in someone should prepare I just want to give you a general overview as to how things look so open that up you can get a glimpse of the operating systems on each of these as well and I've done overviews on all operating systems you can see the bevy of server admins at sprint does sprint TVs for navigation then all sort of come free with your everything planned will open up YouTube you get a few more options here on androids and what you get with the pre you can view by most popular those of you top-rated let's take a look at any video and see how it looks will take the first one there you can see what the video quality is so you can see right there you get a few more button options you get to her that cool green looking bar across the bottom for speed it definitely is a little more feature YouTube experience and you'd expect that it's actually because well Google made the operating system and google owns youtube so you would think they'd have a pretty good built in YouTube viewing experience and they certainly don't disappoint let's go ahead and move on to the last test we're going to do and that's the keyboards really inputting text is very important in both these do it in very different ways the pixi as you can tell has a full physical QWERTY keyboard after the look of it looks very small and you figure it's going to be quite cramped but actually is a pretty good experience for typing i did a video demonstrating the keyboard quality but i'll show you what this looks like as well going to throw that off the screen go and open this up and we'll go to the notes application just need to find the memos there we go and we'll go ahead and open up a new memo and i'll show you just a quick test how the keyboard works on this those are the tests very accurate and surprisingly afternoon if keyboard is shockingly easy to type on which it considering how small it is it's got those sort of ridges and buttons and a little bit a tacky feel make the keyboard nice easy to use what this doesn't have in a big knock I think on webos the whole is auto correct if I type of word or letter wrong it's not going to correct me with a small keyboard it certainly prone to do that that is definitely something to keep in mind but the keyboard on the pixie is one of the better small candy bar qwerty keyboards that I've ever used so if that's important to you and you're worried about the keyboard on the pixi try something you don't need to concern yourself with let's take a look at the keyboard here on the hero okay so we've got a text application open here and you see you've got a on-screen keyboard some haptic feedback meaning when you touch it you get a little bit of vibration feeling and this does have autocorrect so I'll take the same thing this is a test see that I spelt it wrong actually but it does tell me that that is a test my go and hit space automatic erects it they also have a landscape keyboard as well if you want a little bits of a bigger typing experience i'll try this again so it typed it wrong but it corrected it for me so typing is going to come down to which one you prefer whether you like a physical keyboard or an on-screen keyboard i dint to prefer a physical keyboard but the entre experience on the hero is really good and the autocorrect is probably second to none tend to make a lot of mistakes with an on-screen keyboard so you need a good autocorrect system and I think the hero does a fantastic job with it again the day which one do you choose it's gonna be personal preference whether you don't mind the smaller screen the pic saying you like them may be more full-featured browsing experience that you get with it and you can enjoy a full keyboard or whether you want the more open environment of the hero and the android marketplace as opposed to the smaller more limited palms app catalog you're getting both very full-featured media phones although with the hero you are getting Wi-Fi and access to more storage via its micro SD card both are really good options that were something a little bit different than marketplace and I take my hat off to sprint for offering very different but really full feature phones a lot of very good choices now on sprint's network and we guys hope you enjoyed for exclusive content stripping out twitter twitter.com / john for lakers and for all your tech news and create your own tech website even monetize and make a few bucks and to talk to other tech heads check out technobuffalo com see you guys next video bye bye