Gadgetory

what's up everyone jon rettinger from attacking a buffalo here back with a round two of the smartphone Goliath Apple's iPhone 3GS and HTC's droid incredible one running on each ents Network one running on verizon's and round one we compared a ton of really important features including web browsing web speed keyboard text entry and generally UI tweaks and that round definitely went to HTC incredible I'll put a link to it at the end in case you want to check that out and we're back with the promise around to on this round we're going to cover media in particular how the cameras work on each picture is in video how they both handle video playback and audio playback so let's go ahead and get started and of course we're going to start with some geeky specs because it helps sort of understand what we're going to discuss a little bit so starting right now with the droid incredible it has a screen resolution of 480 x 800 on a 3.7 inch screen the iphone 3gs has a little bit smaller 3.5 inch screen and a lower resolution 320 x 480 that comes into play when watching video certainly if you're going to watch media on your device you got to watch it on the screen so moving on to camera this is really where we start to see a big spec difference especially considering the incredible as a brand new device in the iphone 3gs you know now we're looking at up just about your old hardware so the incredible if you flip that sucker over is highlighted by an eight megapixel sensor with dual LED flash with touch to zoom auto focus and on the iphone 3gs we've got a 3 megapixel sensor with no LED and does have auto focus now generally in the camera world higher megapixel does not always equal better pictures you want a higher megapixel edge if you're looking to blow up images because you get a higher pixel density however higher pixel ratios here do actually translate to better picture quality when it comes to these two phones I'll put up the midges right now you can sort of see the the difference the incredible definitely has an edge when it comes to photography and low-light the dual LED flash really makes things pop certainly you're not going to want to blow them up to poster size it's not gonna replace your DSLR but it does take pretty significant pictures and the picture quality does look very nice so both of these also feature video cameras so let's talk a bit about specs on video well the iphone 3gs shoots video at VGA resolution which is 640 by 480 witches you know not bad the droid incredible however shoots video at wvga resolution that extra letter before this actually means something the w means that it shoots at 800 x 480 so you're looking at a bit higher resolution that does actually translate as well to video quality i'll put up some video now compare the two that was shot at exactly the same time exactly the same location so you can see the difference in the video fidelity so youtube doesn't always do justice to the quality of video but suffice to say the increased resolution of the droid incredible does look better in real-world environments than the iphone 3gs when i play a video shot on the droid incredible back on my 24 inch monitor it still looks relatively rutting crisp when i blow up video from the iphone 3gs tends to look a bit on a pixelated side not to say the 3gs takes bad video just enjoy incredible happens to take better video so let's take a look at another way to view video and if you're watching this video on YouTube chances are maybe you're watching it on your phone I do a lot of video viewing on my mobile device so I need a phone that can accommodate so if i go ahead and launch Safari Here I am at my youtube page on for lakers and if i want to watch video embedded on here i have to launch the dedicated youtube player which can be a bit annoying it works well but it takes you away from the web experience so if i want to look at a video I gotta click it then I got to find the mobile link that launched the player and little plate inside of that application a very little way to play video a right in the browser we have seen in browser playback on the iPad that has not yet been implemented here on the iphone however on the droid incredible i go ahead and launch that here i am on the same youtube page and then there are some probably key differences here on the droid incredible we've got flash content in the place that ad in the upper right hand corner that is dynamic and moving not even present here on the iphone 3gs now flash is definitely a polarizing feature some say they must have it have to have it won't do anything without it some say they don't care flash has been a bit of a Jake implementation thus far sometimes flash video will play back or right in the browser sometimes it will not let me go and try and refresh this page and see we can get a playback and I love this problem lies with the droid incredible or its flash implementation or perhaps the YouTube issue but sometimes video play right in here and sometimes it will not looks like it's loading then we get a error occurred please try back later so go ahead and try to hit that play button so weak get it something to play and we're still getting that same error occurred now we'll say that maybe three out of every five times and it refresh the page is a play but those two times if you saw right here it just doesn't so flash wall important to some and certainly important on a desktop experience I get to see a good implementation of it and affluent implementation of it on a mobile device however if that's a feature that's important to you the droid incredible and out of these two devices is the only one that offers it something to keep in mind let's take a look at the audio playback of both these teams they both offer a pretty decent audio playback Apple certainly made the big name for themselves with the ipod and they've sort of implemented some of those key features here over to the iphone so here is the ipod functionality you get your typical ipod or a playlist artists songs videos scroll through some of them and if you turn it off to the side you get a kind of a cool cover flow of you go ahead and push that back and if you pick a song you can go ahead and pause it right there you can pick either a genius playlist which essentially will take songs that are similar we're listening to and make its own playlist you can shuffle songs at random or just do a simple shuffle or a loop play playback buttons pretty simple menu system does work well and you've got your artwork right on the front of the album artwork is available now if you want to buy music from an Apple device is it going to sound for your familiar you're limited to apple's walled garden you have to go through itunes in order to get music onto the device certainly you can buy any non drm songs that you like from amazon or any other source loaded into itunes sync it up and it'll certainly play but you're limited to get the information onto the device from itunes there's a mobile store built right in we can go ahead and download all the songs and videos that you'd like it doesn't work very well but they run about 99 cents each per song definitely can add up let's take a look at audio playback here on the droid incredible so go ahead and tap music and it got sort of a colorful looking fuel to you've got a some 3d animations right there and I love seeing a 3d stuff on the droid incredible lets me know they're putting that Snapdragon processor use let's pick a song here uh here's youth explosion go in it play you get the simple options that you would get on on most audio playback devices you get shuffle you get loop you go play next song but since this is running HTC Sense you do get some other options so i'm going to show you what those are so here you can view all your artists albums playlist songs on Rose composers or purchased you can buy music directly on device from amazon's mp3 store or since android is very open anywhere that you want to get music from that's not drm you can go ahead and play it right on android you plug your device in essentially just drag the music files right over it is pretty easy video playback on both devices something that I think YouTube is not going to do justice for video playback on each share is relatively smooth Android when his first launch was not known for its multimedia prowess however that has certainly been a dress i think in recent software updates firmware updates and the hardware updates serve coming to what I'm saying to be the ultimate Android device which would be the droid incredible so video playback looks very smooth on both showing you here really wouldn't do it any justice so let's jump backwards in time to talk about the cameras we showed some pictures let me show you the camera interfaces that's something that is a big diff differential factor so here's the very simple camera interface on the iphone 3gs oh I want to take a picture here's a expo marker for example and go ahead and get in focus I can tap it a lot of focus and I can go ahead and stand my picture that is really the extent of it now for example I launch the camera on the droid incredible you have a few more options and this is really HTC's Sense tweaks that do quite a bit so go ahead and put that same expo marker there and if I wanted to I could just snap a picture I can tap to zoom as well or tap to focus rather and I can hit the optical joy but joystick button tap it and it will snap the picture however I've got a ton just lock the device however have a ton of other customization options show you as well something I don't tap the lock button the process go and hit that arrow right there you get really some pretty advanced options for mobile device i'll show you what all those are here so you can choose whether you want to jump at the photo or video you've got your brightness options you can tweak it any way you like up or down you've got a contrast saturation and sharpness which some of you photo files out there may like you've got a ton of effects to it you're kind of neat and got a quite a few of them grayscale Sofia negative solarized posterize and aqua so there's aqua turns things blue these or take a look and see how it does with things it's sort of neat let's go back to negative I kind of like that one so there's the marker you can see it's all reversed but you want to show you that you do get sort of some advanced functionality and of course you have flash options up here as well I take advantage of that dual LED flash so I can turn it on turn it off turn it auto let's turn it on we slowed the negative effect here and we'll take a picture see the flashlight up and I hit the power button I keep doing that me to take pictures but you do see that you get access to both of these flash models on the bottom and you get a lot more customization options when it comes to the camera on each so at the end of the day both phones offer I think very unique experiences Apple's got a very tightly integrated operating system they make the hardware they make thee or the outsourcer hardware but they control the hardware and they control the operating system should they create a seamless experience however they're also very closed if you want to get into a product you want to use Apple products you're very limited to what they call the walled garden you have to stay within sort of the everywhere and all-encompassing itunes in order to really use the device the android operating system on the other hand and particularly the joy incredible is very open you can customize it you could tweak it i can do a ton of really anything that you like and you can get music from a variety of sources and drag and drop them right on so it's really going to be personal preference but they like that tightly integrated Apple experience whether you want sort of a more a loose open experience with Android definitely going to be a personal preference if we have to declare winter here and just based solely on camera performance and specs and features again it has to go to the droid incredible although it is worthwhile to mention that we're looking at probably just about year old hardware here and the new hardware here on the droid incredible certainly when the iphone 4g launches and we can put modern against modern made different results but when we're looking at these two which are the current release models i think the droid incredible represents just a fantastic phone a great value and a really good experience overall so guys if you missed around one be sure to check it out i'll put a link to it at the end so you can watch it and i'm really curious what you guys have to think too is the droid incredible device for you or you waiting for a gsm version of it are you going to jump to verizon or a cube upgrade i'm going to want to know what you guys think leave comments or video responses anyway i'm jon rettinger from TechnoBuffalo and i'll see you in the next video