Gadgetory

hey guys jon rettinger from technobuffalo here this is a fantastic time of the year to be in the market for a new smartphone because there are so many great options available probably two of the hottest that are out right now are the palm pre plus for verizon wireless and the Old Faithful the iphone 3gs for AT&T so we're going to put these two Bohemia's head-to-head in a series of tests in the issue of time we can't cover every category but we are going to cover at least in this round browser and speed text entry customization scrolling navigation apps device integration and notifications also go over some of the general specs of the devices as well so from a price standpoint the iphone 3gs or run you anywhere from 1 99 299 and all these prices of course with a new two-year contract the palm pre is going to run you 100 to forty-nine dollars for storage standpoint the iphone 3gs can have either 16 or 32 gigabyte sizes and the palm pre plus has only 16 games a wait for the iphone were looking at 4.7 6 ounces compared to 4.89 on the pre and from a displaced in point the iphones got a 3.5 inch that's diagonal this flight with a 320 x 480 resolution the palm pre is a 3.1 inch display with a 320 x 480 resolution to the same resolution bit smaller display so it also sort of the boring tech stuff let's get into the important things of really one of the things that I look at most in a smartphone is browsing I do a lot of work on a mobile browser and it's paramount for me that my device can keep up and in terms of modern browsing experience so both these are multi touch enabled we're going to do speed tests and sort of show you how the browsers work we're going to test this feet first on Wi-Fi and then on 3g of course on verizon wireless is EV geo and 18 keys 3g networks so Wi-Fi is connected to both let's go ahead and get started we're going to load up technobuffalo calm get them cued up and ready to go okay they're hitting almost exactly the same time you can track the progress on the iPhone by the blue bar across the top or by the sort of filling blue circle on the right-hand corner of the pre the iphone is the first device to show content the palm pre plus the close behind looks like both are almost done the pre just finished and the iphone is still running was like it should be done in just a minute so the pre was a bit faster on the same Wi-Fi network let's take a look at browsing experience sometimes on lower processor power devices when you scroll very quickly you get sort of a checkerboard pattern below let's see if it happens on either of these devices so the processor on the iphone 3gs can keep up you don't see that checkerboard pattern and it goes fast as I scroll and has a very nice physics engine meeting as I scroll slowly it's go slowly or if I go fast and I'll go as fast as my finger take a look pretty so you did see a little bit of a checkerboard pattern get to look very quickly goes away but it is there it's definitely something to keep in mind so let's go ahead and check out multi-touch since both of these are multi touch enabled devices will start with the iphone so the two finger pinch and zoom is sort of the Old Faithful very smooth and I can pan around anywhere I want I can double tap and zoom out let's try this on the palm pre plus relatively smooth as well you do see the scroll and when you go back and forth that checkerboard pattern it doesn't last for very long but it is there and see eventually see it when i zoom in first on a new area of text zoom in and zoom out so it's smooth and it's a pretty good implementation link the iphone defa guys a little bit smoother but the palm pre does a fantastic job with multi-touch implementation and you can do the same double tap to zoom in and double tap to zoom out well again you do see that checkerboard pattern there just a little bit the palm pre is probably the second best browser that I've seen on mobile device second behind the iphone i do want to preface this by saying i am an iphone user but i am very objective I've been a big fan of webos and the palm pre in general but are comparing browser to browser the pre is pretty well featured but the iphone seems to have just a bit of an edge let's go ahead and try speed we're going to load up on my youtube channel youtube.com slash John for lakers and we're going to turn off Wi-Fi and rely just on the 3g networks of both devices okay so why if I has been turned off we've got anywhere from say two to three bars of a video signal with the palm pre and we've got about now we've got four or five bars of signal it just jumped up and we've got five bars of 3g signal on the iphone 3gs so it should be a pretty fair comparison five bars 25 bars certainly this speeds going depends on where you are I'm in Southern California so it's you're the only representative of my area but least you can get a sense of how the 3g networks stand up on both devices so we'll load up my youtube page open up bookmarks let's see what that looks like here and we'll do the same thing i'll go to youtube I hit them both the same time and let's check out the speed and again this is not Wi-Fi this is a 3g 2 3g network so the pre was the first one to show content where it was opposite on we're testing it over Wi-Fi and again you can see the progress down there and right over there so now the iphone is trying to contact the pre's got nothing is showing pre looked just about done and the iphone is still processing up the iphone finished and the pre is still going through my neck and neck race here and i do have five bars of 3g service on each 12 this testing was underway the pre is still loading now you can use a browser while it's still loading but it's not completely done yet will let it finish you can get a sense of how long it's going to take and in real world testing i have noticed that EMTs network as far as data has been relatively faster than four aizen's for daily web usage and the pre is done they can do the same service scrolling test and see if we get that pattern again maybe was just an anomaly on TechnoBuffalo so very quickly it shows up there but not much zoom in pinch and zoom and of course both will rotate as you move around that will check out the iphone so the palm pre has a very nice browsing experience I've really enjoyed using it I'm certainly the iphone is my preferred for browsing but if you were sort of worried about the prius browsing experience definitely don't worry at all it's a probably second to only one as far as I'm concerned I think the palm has really done a fantastic job so one of the big differentiators about these two devices is text entry the pre has a very nice design sort of looks like a pond rock the text entry is done via slide-out QWERTY keyboard the iphone is without keyboard and relies on text entry by an on-screen keyboard the pre plus at least as of this filming does not have any sort of native on-screen keyboard options so the only way to get in text is through this and the iphone certainly doesn't have any sort of attachment for an external keyboard so you're limited to just be on screen let's go ahead and give this a shot and saying again i want to say that i am an iphone users so I'm probably more used to the iphone keyboard but i have been using the palm pre plus is my dedicated device for the past two weeks so I have become relatively familiar with how it works let's go ahead and open up the notes application you get a chance to see what that looks like on here as well there's so many different things that we can test and show and unfortunately the really going to time considerations we're sort of limited will do other rounds to show how all they stack up so got a new memo here and the keys are raised and gone from the initial palm pre keyboard that launched on sprint orange button is no longer there it's now sort of grey the keys have a little bit more quickie field to them in the sliding mechanism feels a bit better so I'm going to go ahead and type this is a test and we'll see how it works and also as i type notice that there won't be any auto correction which is an issue that will discuss in just a minute let's go ahead and start typing so this is a test so it was close it did it did autocorrect a bit but it's not entirely accurate let me try that one more time I'll type on the palm pre so on the palm pro it's not the most accurate but I have found that with practice I'm getting better the keys are small you can see we're sort of one of my finger goes over it I don't have the fattest fingers in the world but I do cover almost four keys with one finger link the keyboard lot of people that rely on a physical QWERTY keyboard may be disappointed with the speeded they can type on the palm pre looking at the device like a blackberry the keyboard is really well laid out it serves crunched and small on the palm pre plus I have not been a fan of the physical keyboard here on the pre oftentimes it is nice to have an actual keyboard for buttons and gaming as such so we'll talk about a little later on the video but it can tend to get a little fat thumb and the auto correction is I don't think that good let's take a look at the notes application here for the iphone going to open up a new note and we'll try typing in both ways in landscape and keyboard and we'll type this is a test again so not accurate this is a teat that's how it autocorrected let's try it in landscape the incorrect answer either kind of goes fast as I can so the moral here is that probably I'm not a very accurate I / on anything I prefer the experience on the iPhone actually to the palm pre but I do appreciate having a physical keyboard I think the autocorrect on the iphone is probably as good as out there android is a very close second or even better some people may argue that auto correction again is not really so there on the palm pre so text entries is probably going to come down to personal preference I recommend that you go to a verizon store and you try out the keyboard on the palm pre plus your experience may be very different than mine you may have smaller fingers and think that it works perfectly for you definitely something to keep in mind so the next thing we're going to talk about is customization and what you can do to make sort of the device yours so the palm pre could minimize all this stuff here has a limited customization options you can change the background you can change these icons that are here in the dock and you can change the order of applications in your launcher but that's about it you can you can pick ringtones but you don't have any customizations over a text tones or anything like that you're relatively limited to what you can do and customize on the pomp reading and speaking of limited customization customization options let's talk about the iphone it is perhaps as much if not more limited than the palm pre plus now it's been one of the big knocks on the iPhone from day one so you really can't do much with it to make it yours certainly without jailbreaking you're stuck with the black background you can reorganize any icons that you want from the dock or on the icon screens and that's really the extent of it you could pick your ringtone but as far as further customization goes you're quite limited one other thing that I saw would be remiss to not mention is that the palm pre plus does have the option for a mobile hotspot additional forty dollars per month that i did a video showing what this is essentially it lets you turn this device into a mifi meeting it's going to suck in verizon's evdo signal and kick out Wi-Fi that you and four can hook up to and as of now in the US the iphone 18t offer no sort of tethering or mobile hotspot options so if that's important to you if your mobile traveler and your need something that you can hook up out the internet the iphone is not going to be for you if you want to use one device for everything definitely something to keep in mind the palm pre plus it's going to be where you're going to want to look so where the iphone really shined in the capital in general is the App Store certainly you've all seen now demonstrating countless videos it is just a well-designed oiled machine with hundreds of credit of thousands of apps nothing with up to 130 140 apps I mean they're just an app for just about everything and it really is true categories feature you can view the most popular out there there are a ton of apps inserting these from the commercials really you can find an application I'll do just about everything now the palm pre also has an app catalog and just launched and just sort of redone at CES 2010 to give developers a little more access to the code it's really not as robust as Apple's offering but there are still some good applications and there it's growing certainly not nearly as fast a fraction of the size of the iphone i found a lot of the applications in there actually religious applications I'm sitting go ahead and pick popular for example you can see it gets rid of a moving icon across the top and from a horsepower standpoint both of these pretty much have the same processor and just about same amount of RAM so they're capable of relatively similar graphs capabilities we can view all these some of them are free something costs but when i first tested the palm pre when it launched on sprint they were limited to i believe 12 applications there now are many many more clearly the edge goes to the iphone but if that patients are important to you don't look away from the palm pre because it's growing every day the fact that's now on two carriers and four devices it's only going to be getting better and palm is doing an excellent job about incentivizing developers to create new app so i think the really app store here is going to be growing up by leaps and bounds so i found a lot of apps i'd like to use a lot of fun ones you don't have a lot of sort of the fluffy them apps you may find app store in the iphone if you want to look for a twitter application on the iphone you might have 10 or 20 or 30 options you know on the palm pre you might only have three four or five that really stays true through all categories something to keep in mind so the next thing we're talking about apps I want to talk about multitasking that's really one of the big big things that the palm pre plus does well the iphone really doesn't have any multitasking to speak of you can be on a phone call and access your applications up that's about it the palm pre plus has true multitasking and probably is the best implementation multitasking that I have ever seen so right now I've got the app catalog open let's go back to sail on open a browser and open that up I'm using what's called a deck of cards feature and I'm accessing that by hitting this home button which is really a backlit LED that I can gesture with and I can open up Twitter application you can see that I can open up really just a myriad of applications here and scroll through them as quickly or slowly as i like it to close them it's kind of fun you just swipe it up now one of the knocks on the palm pre has been the speed in which it loads applications let me give you an example so let's do a speed test and I'll close everything of opening up the calendar app and serve as a double-edged sword here and I'll show you why where is calendar calendar there it is to open up calendar on each the same time you can check out the speed so clearly the iphone launched that much faster but now let's say i want to launch my notes program again well i got it exit out and I got to go to notes and I wait for notes to launch now on the pre if I want to open notes go the notes up asian or memos that it's called here and it takes longer on the pre definite takes lauren open applications now here's the thing let's say i want to go back and open up calendar on the iphone i got close it I open up calendar on the palm pre plus it's already been opened I can go ahead and do that and opens up almost instantaneously so the first time you open it the iphone is going to be quicker however once you have it open and leave it opened its really very very fast today I got some notifications popping up there really quick multitasking is very impressive definitely something to keep in mind you can open up really almost 50 cards here and the device will slow down a little bit but really will keep working so next thing I want to talk about is notifications and it's one of the things that the palm pre does really well you can see right down there I've got well a notification if I have an email on the iphone I get a Hello icon vector that shows up little red bubble how many emails I have my facebook messages or things I have to do palm pre has this notification dairy across the bottom see right there I've got an envelope if I tap it that an email here from from a friend and I can go ahead and click it and go right to the email or if I want to go up in a my gmail in general I can tap it and I'll open it up if I wanna get rid of it I can just swipe it away so notifications why is the palm pre plus definitely handles and webos in general he knows notifications very well so the moral is which one do i recommend well I like them both and I can't pick one it's going to come down to again personal preference i think the webos the palm pre plus does a lot of things really well multi tasking probably being its crown jewel the iphone is only the crown jewels are probably the browsing experience that you're going to get and the massive app store so if you get reception on both AT&T and Verizon I can't tell you which to pick recommend going and trying both I'd be equally happy using these as my daily driver those do that follow my videos you know that I am very very demanding on my phones I don't say that I could pick one very often but these two are things that I could be very happy using and it's really going to come down to which one you decide so stay tuned to the channel and technobuffalo com for further rounds of versus videos we've got the palm pre vs nexus one coming up and some more head-to-head so definitely stick around for all that at technobuffalo com for exclusive content guys check me out of twitter twitter.com / john for lakers i'm jon rettinger and i will see you in the next video