IPhone 5 Compared With Competitors | Hacker News Reader

IPhone 5 Compared With Competitors

mashable.com

23 pointsneya33 comments

These tables hide a lot of information.

For example, the screen is compared simply by pixels and physical size but there is no mention of screen quality. I have a desk full of Android devices and for most of them, the screens are large but really, really poor when it comes to color reproduction, dithering, and/or brightness.

The same problem manifests with the CPU/GPU comparison. I will take an Apple A6 any day of the week over a Snapdragon S4 with an Adreno GPU. I've had nothing but problems with Adrenos -- their performance is poor in comparison to the newer PowerVR chips and their crappy drivers have required me to dumb down some of my shaders that work flawlessly on all other mobile GPUs (Tegra, Mali, and PowerVR).

That said, I'm happy Apple finally enlarged the screen so it's more in line with where the Android market is. After using some of the higher end Android phones, my plain-jane iPhone4 is showing its age.

>their performance is poor in comparison

Benchmarks or it didn't happen.

Benchmarks don't matter one bit, because they just measure "raw" power. These platforms (iOS and Android) use different operating systems, and they implement graphics routines, animations, drawing, etc. wildly differently. So, X could have a 30% more powerful GPU than Y, but the "perceived" speed of X could be less than Y. That's why iPhone was so much smoother than Android before 4.1.

That's absolutely true, but then you aren't comparing CPUs or GPUs anymore, but the OS.

Consumers don't care about product specs, they care about their dreams, goals, and aspirations.

Compare an iPhone commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP1YAatv1Mc

to a DROID commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-K71MpwCko

Apple commercial => fun, likable personality using the product, and benefiting from it.

Droid commercial => OMG uber technology forged from a robot beast with a processor and LTE and a bunch of other stuff. 0 product. 0 benefits.

Droid is selling technology, Apple is selling an experience. It seems so obvious which one a mainstream consumer with no interest in the innards of their phone is going to choose. Google understands this concept, judging by their own marketing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqiSE-ukmgc

Maybe now that they've acquired Motorola they'll knock some sense into their marketing strategy

You've been pretty disappointed with the iPhone launch it seems. Thanks for letting us all know, Mr.Staunch Apple defender =)

Its funny how picky you get when choosing between these commercials. You should have chosen one of the Galaxy's commercials and it does a great job of explaining everything, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWnunavN4bQ

Samsung has great marketing, picking a fight is a fantastic strategy. However, this comercial still sells features not benefits. Imagine how much more powerful the comercial would be if they could capture the benefit to the samsung user. How does having 4G improve my life?

When I see this Samsung commercial or the Droid commercial from my original post, I can just picture the company execs giving their ad agency a list of features that need to be included in the commercial, because the features are what's important to the company. The problem is, customers don't care about features at all, they care about what those features allow them to do.

I'm really not sure this is true. I'd like to see evidence of it because certainly the people I know who buy android do it for features. That's also how they evangelize. It seems to work. Apple has a great marketing strategy but that doesn't mean the best competitive response is to mimic it.

Google's own Nexus commercials are a much better analogue to Apple's "dreams, goals, and aspirations" commercials. See the Galaxy Nexus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdD8s0jFJYo or Nexus 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2XmymhCdHU

While I agree that everyday consumers couldn't care less, I think "dreams, goals and aspirations" is giving Apple way too much credit. Apple ads are cool. People want cool.

I actually don't think the Droid ads are so misguided. Look at ads for pickup trucks, sports cars and the like. People do respond to ads like that, they're just more demographically specific than Apple's ones.

To be fair, I'm a developer and I don't care about those features, either. Android ceding the browser wars (at least until Chrome is the default) matters so much more to me than the kind of difference you need benchmarks to notice.

There are numerous errors on this chart, so I'll just cover one. Some of the items under the Samsung Galaxy S III are wrong, at least on VZW and AT&T. There are only 16 (AT&T/VZW)and 32 GB (VZW only) versions at $199 and $249, respectively.

Also, the talk and standby times are a total crock [1]. The battery life is great -- slightly less than on par with the 4S.

1. Citation: I own an SGSIII (along with an iPhone 4S) and have tested battery life quite a bit.

Amazon just lowered the price on the S3 to $99: http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Galaxy-Android-Verizon-Wireles...

With contract only, for those of us still on contract. Without, it's still $600.

That's why I was happy to grab my Galaxy Nexus direct from Google for $350 w/o needing to have a contract.

A better comparison over at the Verge:

http://www.theverge.com/products/compare/6116/5807/6082/6024...

The Galaxy S3 has a Quad core version too, though.

This comparison isn't very useful without display PPI, NFC, thickness, etc.

It's about as ghetto as a feature grid can get.

Only geeks delve into spec sheets comparisons.

That makes as much sense as comparing a Mustang and a Mercedes by horsepower to decide which car to buy.

It's funny, but that chart made me want to buy the Galaxy S3 ... on specs alone O.o.

... also, I tend to like Android, especially for the back-button.

after getting used to my galaxy nexus, 4" screens look seriously cramped. i'm actually kind of surprised apple hasn't jumped onto the 4.5"+ bandwagon yet.

Not that surprising. Apple's pretty much locked into 640px width. An increase there would enrage app devs and designers. And cause a heap of compatibility issues.

Outside of tech geeks, real people don't care about this. They care about the UX.

And apps :)

Oh, please tell me about how having a single button for everything provides great UX. Seriously, no back button is what you call great UX?

Android is removing physical back buttons and iPhone's had the single button work well with the interface since 2007...

Android is removing physical buttons but still have back, home and "multitasking" buttons.

With Android, the back button's a case of mystery meat navigation: App developers are able to override the button's behavior to implement their own semantics for the "back" command, which means that for the end user its behavior is unpredictable.

The standard on iOS is to implement navigation buttons in software as needed. Done right, this is better UX, because different apps can provide different navigation buttons to support different navigation schemes.

iOS's One Button to Rule them All also behaves different ways in different contexts, but the way it behaves is fairly easy to learn because it's consistently linked to the screen's visual state.

In short, neither is terribly great UI. But I think this is one of those cases where which one is worse is entirely dependent on which one you're more used to.

Coming from a Blackberry Storm, my fiance tried an iPhone 4S and said "This is so complicated. Why is there only one button? What's it do?"

Ended up with a Droid Incredible 2. She loves it.

Even tech geeks shouldn't care about half the specs. A 1GHz CPU running iOS will perform differently to a 1GHz CPU running Android which will perform differently to a 1GHz CPU running Windows Phone.

Just looking at numbers like this is a gross simplification.

Right, on mobile the OS makes a great difference in perceived performance. Also, tech geeks know that GHz is a quite limited metric to compare CPUs.

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