Comparison Between iPhone and HTC Hero - Part 1/2

Comparison Between iPhone and HTC Hero - Part 1/2 What’s up tech heads? Jon Rettinger from TechnoBuffalo here. The HTC Hero has been out for a little over a week now and it’s main competitor, at least in the major market is the iPhone 3GS. So I thought it will only be fair to give you a head to head comparison of the iPhone versus the HTC Hero. This is just part one and 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 speeds but edge speeds are going vary depending on where are you at. Wi-Fi has sort of levels to the playing field. Let’s go ahead and get started. We’re going to go ahead and open up each browser. So there is Safari and it’s going to load HTC’s Website. So, the comparison site that we’re going to use is technobuffalo.com and let me go and input that right now and we’ll start the loading process. Okay. We’ve got it cued up and ready to go on both devices here and this is just going to measure the speed again over the same Wi-Fi network and how it quickly loads a standard website. So, let me go and try to hit Go at the same time. Here it is as close as I can get. It is much more different than it looks. There it 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 the 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 pixilation letting me know that it's loading. It’s very instantaneous and it looks very smooth. Its physics engine goes nice and easily with my finger. And when I get the top, it does a little bounce. And let see how it looks on the HTC Hero. On the iPhone you’ll notice that it’s actually scaled to have the whole site fit in on the—or in the iPhone, it scaled up the whole fit in. On the HTC Hero, it sort of zoomed in on the upper left hand corner. Let see how it looks while scrolling. Scrolling is still pretty smooth. No pixilation either. You don’t get the same sort of bouncing on the physics engine but it does work and it works quite well. I think we’re going to call this one a draw. I get the feeling that both do a very quick and a really painless job at navigating around. So, both of this 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 seen so you’ll get sort of sneak preview. Take two fingers, can zoom in. See how smooth that was and it kind of clears up the text and you can see here’s a note to our beta testers. Go on and zoom out and zoom in. See it's very quick and you can do a double tap to zoom in and double tap to zoom out. Now the HTC Hero claims out the same features. Let’s put that to test and see how they work. We’re going to use the same two fingers and we will zoom in and zoom out. Zoom out on the same part here that we’re using before. There’s some text. Zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, and zoom out. It 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 and double tap out. So that definitely works and it works actually and 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— let’s say YouTube video and you’re on a website that’s got a YouTube video. So, here is a video that we embedded here of let’s the say the iRobot Roomba unboxing from a while back. I'm going to go hit Play and that’s going to launch the Apple YouTube player that plays in a separate window. Give it a second to load up and it should start playing. There is goes. So, there’s our Roomba un-boxing. You hit Done and you go back to the web site. 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 we’ll 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. It’s a little bit strange. I was expecting it to play right in the window. Here it’s loading a video that Brandon did on PocketNow so go hit Stop. We’ll hit the Back button and we’ll go right back to the website. So, that was interesting. One thing that I was quite excited about with having the flash capability is I thought, “Hey, maybe I can check out of Hulu when I’m on my device. Well, Hulu does not work but I’m going to show you that I can actually going to load the Hulu webpage to do another speed comparison. Alright, so we've Hulu.com cued up and ready to go on each and we’ll hit Go at the same time and we’ll see how this shapes up. Alright, it looks like I actually got it at same time. The iPhone is turning 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 test that I’ve done. The web browser and the speed on the Hero is quick not quite as quick as it is on the iPhone that maybe due to a relatively a nemic of 528 megahertz processor found on the Hero. And I have to say, that is not fast but with the sensei wide that’s on the Hero, it is very processor intensive. So both are done and you can see again that this formats it as you would see on a regular web page but of course you can’t play content. Let’s see that we can do on the Hero. It should be able just to play videos right from here but unfortunately, you can’t. 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 have to declare a winner of the browser wars here of the iPhone 3GS versus the 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 Apple’s 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 acquitted too if you go to a television store and don’t forget to two TVs right next to each other. You might notice that one is a little brighter and the picture’s a little bit crisper than the one next to it. but if you take the lesser those TVs home that you put up on your wall, it’s going to look fantastic and you'll never know and then remember how compared to that one TV 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 portrait keyboards found on the devices certainly the iPhone people maybe 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 TouchfFlo-ish HTC keyboard. It might look familiar if you’ve used TouchFlo on any Windows Mobile devices. It’ 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 and you can get a little bit of vibration when you touch the key but it is on the HTC Hero. I actually 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 that on the HTC Hero and you get that same option. It pops up and you can make the typing a lot easier to know what you’re typing. Both keyboards are actually very forgiving. If you are sort of hitting the middle, you generally get the key you're looking for. So, it actually I've been quite happy. So, let’s go ahead and do a speed tests. Again, for 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 beforehand before I get into do my own typing. Let’s go ahead and type a message. Push that off to the side for a minute. We’ll type, “Hi. I’m recording a video.” And I'll try to do this as fast as I can. So, “Hi. I an.” So, there’s a little bit of mistake there. You saw some auto correct but it is quick and I think it is relatively easy to use maybe just because I am 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. “Hi. I am recording a video.” They actually got a right, I think a mass to correct the spelling but the auto correct that you may have seen stepped up. So while we’re talking about auto correct, 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 E, V and I don’t hit the E, I hit the W, R, Y. so there it goes. It tells me that I've forgotten to spell the word. And if I want to accept it, I just hit space and it will change it. And if I want to keep the misspelling, because maybe it’s abbreviation or something, I just tap that little X and that’s how it works on the iPhone. So, how does it work on the Hero? Let me show you. I'll do the same mistake here. And you'll see that as I type, it starts to fill on the word. And if I wanted to just keep typing, I can— and it will automatically auto correct it. If I don’t want to use the word that’s auto corrected, I can actually hit the one next to it. So, that’s what it uses in place of the X. The auto-correct feature in 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 this offer in addition to this portrait keyboards is there’s 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 but also if you 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. We’ll go ahead and give it a turn. It takes a second and there you get your landscape keyboard on the hero. The screen goes grey a little bit and then it will rotate. So, we can pull back a little bit and the both of those at the same time— let’s see if we can see the speed that these rotated. So, it looks like the Hero was a little bit faster there. Let’s try it one more time— the other one and the iPhone was a little bit faster there. So, it really is just going to depend on your usage. Landscape keyboard, it’s sort of the same keyboard that you are used to on most non physical QWERTY devices and it’s probably the same rules that I've talked about earlier. It is very easy to type on, quite easy to use. If you want to type number, the number and symbol button that will pull out the same thing on the iPhone. So anyway guys, I hope you enjoyed the overview and really the first comparison of the iPhone 3GS versus HTC Hero. I've been very impressed with the Hero. For more iPhone versus Hero comparison, be sure to stick around to the channel because there’s going to be plenty more covering UI and a lot of other features. So for exclusive content, be sure to check me out on Twitter, twitter.com/Jon4lakers. And to Techno Buffalo like you saw, if you want to learn more, check out technobuffalo.com or you have Techno Buffalo to follow at Twitter.com/technobuffalo and I will see you guys in the next video. Bye-bye.