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iPhone 3GS vs. HTC Hero

2009-08-06
what's up tech it's John render from TechnoBuffalo here the HTC Hero has been out for a little over a week now and its main competitor at least in all major markets is the iPhone 3GS so I got an only fair to give you a head-to-head comparison of the iPhone versus the HTC Hero this is just part one that's going to cover browser and keyboard input let's go ahead and get started also I want to mention one more time this is the 3GS and this of course is the HTC Hero that does not have us 3G bands so these tests are going to be conducted on Wi-Fi using the same Wi-Fi network we could do a test over edge beads but edge speeds are going to vary depending on where you're at Wi-Fi sort of levels the playing field let's go ahead and get started gonna go ahead and open up each browser so they're Safari this is gonna load HTC's website so the comparison site that we're going to use is TechnoBuffalo comm and i'm gonna go ahead and put that right now and we'll start the loading process okay so we've got a queued up and ready to go on both devices here and this is just gonna measure the speed again over the same Wi-Fi network how quickly it loads a standard website so I'm gonna go ahead and try and hit go at the same time here at least as close as I can get much more difficult than it looks there we go and they are both off the iPhone 3GS does have a little faster processor and it's already loaded the site and the hero just finished so a little bit behind the iPhone definitely was a clear winner there so let's check at how smooth navigation and scrolling is with the iPhone scrolling is very smooth I can scroll down to the bottom pretty quickly and I don't get any sort of pixelation letting me know that it's loading it's very instantaneous and it looks very smooth it's physics engine goes nice and easily with my finger I want to get to the top does little bounce and let's see how it looks on the HTC Hero on the iPhone you'll notice that it's actually scaled to have the whole I fit in on the iron the iPhone and scale to have the whole site fit in on the HTC Hero it's sort of zoomed in on the upper left-hand corner let's see how it looks with scrolling scrolling is still pretty smooth no pixelation either you don't get the same sort of balancing on the physics engine but it does work and it works quite well you we're gonna call this one a draw I get the feeling that both do very quick and relatively painless job at navigating around so both these devices do have multi-touch so let's check out how that multi-touch works on the iPhone of course the famous two fingers so this is the TechnoBuffalo beta site that actually all our beta testers are seeing so you can get sort of a sneak preview take two fingers can zoom in so I'll smooth that wasn't it kind of clears up the text and you can see here's a note to our beta testers go ahead and zoom out zoom in zoom in zoom out see it's very quick and we can do a double tap to zoom in double tap to zoom out now the HTC hero claims to have the same features let's put that to a test and see how they work we're gonna use the same two fingers and we will zoom in and zoom out the mountain though that's the same part here that were using before there's some text zoom in zoom out zoom in and zoom out takes a little bit longer it's not as fluid but it definitely works and really works quite well the double tap that I showed you earlier double tap in double tap out so that definitely works and it works actually probably one of the better implementations that I've seen so one of the cool things about the HTC Hero browser the iPhone doesn't have is flash so let me show you what it looks like if you want to play a YouTube video and you're on a website it's got a youtube video so here's a video that we embedded here of let's say the irobot roomba unboxing from a while back I'm gonna go ahead play and that's gonna launch the Apple YouTube player that plays in a separate window gives it a second to load up and it should start playing there it goes so there's a room button boxing you had done and you go back to the website so this has flash capability so I should be able to just hit play and I would assume that it would play right within this window so I use that multi-touch feature and zoom in and you get the same play button that you would get right on your main computer hit play and it opens up a YouTube viewer just as it did on the iPhone which is a little bit strange though expected to play it right in the window there's loading a video that Brandon did on Pocket now so get hit stop well hit the back button will go right back to the website so that was interesting one thing that I was quite excited about with having the Flash capabilities I thought hey maybe I could check out Hulu when I'm on my device well who who does not work but I'm going to show you that I'm actually gonna load the Hulu web page to do another speed comparison alright so you've got hulu.com queued up and ready to go on each I will hit go at the same time and we'll see how the ships up our items like actually got it at the same time the iPhone showing first progress and again the iPhone is done and the hero is still lagging behind quite a little bit and I should say that these speeds are actually pretty representative of my own comparison tests that I've done the web browser and speed on the hero is quick not quite as quick as it is on the iPhone that may be due to a relatively anemic 500 megahertz icon the 28 megahertz processor found on the hero and not to say that's not fast but with the Sense UI that's on the hero it is very processor intensive so both are done and you can see again this formats it as you would see on a regular web page but of course you can't play any content let's see what we can do on the hero now you should be able just to play videos right from here but unfortunately you can't just zoomed in and I was a little bit disappointed I thought it would have been a great feature to be able to play videos so you make your own comparisons if I to declare a winner of the browser wars here of the iphone 3gs versus a hero I do have to give it to the iPhone to give you a full disclosure I am an iPhone user so perhaps I'm just more used to the iPhone but the fluidity and the speed really make me tend and trend towards apples offering that's not to say that the browser on the hero is bad it's actually very full-featured and quite robust and I think you would be very happy with it I equate it to if you go to a television store looking at two TVs right next to each other you might notice that one's a little bit brighter in the pictures a little bit crisper than the one next to it but if you take the lesser of those TVs home you put it up on your wall it's gonna look fantastic and you'll never know and then remember how compared to that one TV stay next to it so let's go ahead and move on to the next phase of our competition the keyboards so here are the two port your keyboards found on the devices certainly in the iPhone people may be familiar with and the keyboard that is found on the HTC Hero this is not the keyboard that you find on other Android devices running the donut build like the g1 or even the mytouch 3G this is more of a touch flow ish HTC keyboard and might look familiar if you've used touchflo up on any windows mobile devices its spaced in between on the iPhone it's not spaced on the HTC here that's more of a preference the iPhone does not offer haptic feedback meaning a little bit of vibration when you touch the key but it is on the HTC Hero actually I think the haptic feedback is quite nice so when you type put your finger over a letter and you'll see that letter pops up on the iPhone you do it on the HTC Hero and you get that same option it pops up I think it makes typing a lot easier to know what you're typing both keyboards are actually very forgiving if you're sort of hitting in the middle you generally get the key you're looking for so I've actually been quite happy so let's go ahead and do a speed test and again full disclosure I am an iPhone user so I'm probably more familiar with the keyboard on the iPhone so I want you to know that four hand before I get it to do my own typing let's go ahead and type a message push that off to the side for a minute well type hi I'm recording a video and I'll try and do this as fast as I can so hi I am them's a little bit of mistake there you saw some auto crack but it is quick and it is I think relatively easy to use and maybe just because I'm familiar with it so we'll move the iPhone off to the side and we'll try it on the hero no recipients that's okay let's go ahead and start typing so hi I'm recording a video they actually got it right I think I massacred the spelling but the autocorrect that you may have seen stepped up so what we're talking about auto auto cracks let me show you how that works on both devices so let's say I am typing away on my iPhone I mean to spell the word every so Evie and I don't hit the e I ate the w ry circo's it tells me that I've gotten to spell the word and if I want to accept it I just hit space and it'll change it and if I want to keep the misspelling because maybe it's an abbreviation or something I just tap that little X and that's how it works on the iPhone so how does it work on a hero let me show you I'll do the same mistake here you'll see that as I type it starts to fill in the word and if I want to just keep typing I can and it automatically auto corrected if I don't want to use the word that's autocorrect and I've actually hit the one next to it so that's what it uses in place of the X the autocorrect feature and sort of the word filling in as you're typing on the HTC Hero is actually quite good and I was very impressed with it so one of the things that both of these offer in addition to these portrait keyboards is a more roomy landscape keyboard so let me show you what both of those look like in addition I'm going to show you the screen rotation time I know that's a software feature if it also can compare maybe the hardware speed and the responsiveness of the accelerometer on each device so let me show you that first on the iPhone go ahead and give it a turn it takes a second and there you get your landscape keyboard on the hero screen goes gray a little bit and then it will rotate so we can pull back a little bit and do both of those at the same time let's see if we can see the speed that these rotating so looks like to here with a little bit faster there let's try it one more time the other way and the iPhone was a little bit faster there so really just you're gonna depend on your usage landscape keyboard it's sort of the same keyboard that you're you - on most non physical QWERTY devices and it follows the same rules that I talked about earlier very easy to type on quite easy to use if you want to type number symbol there's a number and symbol button that will pull that up same thing on the iPhone so many guys hope you enjoyed the overview and really the first comparison of the iPhone 3GS versus the HTC Hero a bit very impressive the hero for more iPhone versus hero comparison these be sure to stick around to the channel this is going to be plenty more covering UI and a lot of other features so for exclusive content check me out on Twitter twitter.com slash John for Lakers and techno Buffett like you saw if you want to learn more check out TechnoBuffalo comm or give TechnoBuffalo a follow at twitter.com slash TechnoBuffalo and i will see you guys in the next video bye-bye
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