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Android vs. Android vs. Android

Posted by Kathleen Maher on May 18th 2011 | Discuss
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: mobile iphone benchmark g2x droid smartphone

A look at the Motorola Droid 2, LG G2X, Sony Ericsson Experia Play

We’re swimming in Android phones right now. We have a (slightly) older Droid 2 that’s actually in use as my working phone, a brand new Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, and an LG G2X. The Droid 2 is a Verizon phone and the G2X and Xperia Play are from T-Mobile. The three phones are very different and they’re aimed at very different users, but there are some basic similarities too. The Droid 2 and the G2X are both based on the Android 2.2 operating system. The Xperia Play is 2.3 Gingerbread. The Droid 2 and the Xperia Play both have 1 GHz processors though the Xperia Play has the newer Snapdragon Scorpion processor. The Droid 2 has a 3.7-inch display, while the G2X and Xperia Play have 4-inch screens. That was probably too many words to say that a comparison of the three seems valid.

The differences are pretty obvious as well. The G2X is based on Nvidia’s Tegra. It’s targeted clearly at gamers and enthusiasts. The Droid 2 has a slide out keyboard and it’s a business like phone. The Experia Play has a slide out PS game pad and has obvious gamer appeal.

For those who haven’t played with an Android phone, the essentials are basically the same, and don’t vary that much from the grid of apps. In theory if you’ve even seen an iPhone you have a pretty good idea of how an Android phone is supposed to work.

The Android operating system is not as easy to get up and running as an iPhone, but it’s not bad. I’m sure it’s not at all cool to admit this but it’s kind of great the way Google has taken over our lives with cloud apps. If you do have all your contacts and mail in Google’s system, it’s a snap to transfer everything to the phone. What’s hard to understand at first about Android is that there are a couple of steps to getting to your apps. There’s turning on the screen, unlocking the screen, and moving beyond the home screen—not a big deal, but an adjustment all the same. Another unobvious feature is that Android keeps track of notifications and background tasks in a pull down bar at the top. It took me a pretty long time to discover this. It’s a useful thing to check every now and then because you might find that you’ve got a bunch of stuff running in the background—the darkside of multi-tasking.

Droid 2

The Droid 2 has become the working telephone. It’s solid, the 5 MP camera is superior to the lousy first-gen iPhone camera and comparable to the newer iPhone 4, but it’s not desperately better. There is a noticeable speed difference between the Droid 2 and the newer phones. We’re using it as a baseline.

One thing I really like on the Droid 2 and miss on the other two phones is the Swype app. It enables you to input type by sliding between letters. It’s very fast once you learn it. Swype is coming out for more Android phones, but I couldn’t find it for the other two phones. I did find SlideIt by Dasur Pattern Recognition Ltd. and it works the same way. It’s worth trying out this type of input for the small digital keyboards that are becoming standard on smart phones. Ironically, the Droid 2 also has a slide out keyboard. For me, Swype is so fast, that I tend to use it instead of the keyboard. However, I don’t want anyone taking away the keyboard either. It’s very convenient for long emails or spontaneous email ruminations in which you don’t want to sound like a foul mouthed 3-year old who can’t spell.

The 5 MP camera is very good with the expected controls including zoom and some nice extras like scenes: landscape, portrait, macro steady, sport, and night shot. Set at standard settings, it’s not great in dark situations, but the camera does a good job under decent circumstances.

Game play? It never really occurred to me to play a game on this phone. It has “Angry Birds,” what more do you need? Actually I also tried out the “Glow Hockey” game the shipped with it, and I had a reasonably good time. It comes with a “Need for Speed Demo.” If you are in a locked room and desperate, you can play games on this phone.

LG G2X

The G2X is a big win for Nvidia’s Tegra 2 and it shows off the chip to good advantage. It’s fast. Browsing is responsive. The camera has 8 MP—more than most mobile phones of this generation—and it looks very good. The G2X screen is bright and tuned to be highly saturated. It might not be right, but its beautiful, and all your pictures look amazing on the phone. They hold up reasonably well when transferred to the computer where they’re displayed in a more normal color gamut.

The G2X is designed for gaming and it has absolutely no problem handling games. All those saturated colors add to the fun. “Need for Speed” is just great on this phone. (It’s good on most smart phones because it’s engineered to take advantage of accelerometers. Have a look at Natural Motion’s “Backbreaker” as well.) In general, I’m terrible at “Need for Speed,” but I’m better on a phone than PC so it’s more fun. The phone ships with TegraZone, an app that conveniently takes you right to a store for more games. In addition to “Need for Speed,” the G2X comes with “Nova.”

The phone is just down right snappy. In fact, I’ll say I was perfectly happy with my little Droid 2 until the G2X put things in perspective. The dual-processor enables better multi-tasking performance when playing games and listening to music, or, for students, reading a book and watching a movie. It puts up with a lot of piled up applications before you start thinking, uh oh, better check to see what all I’ve got running in the background.

A side note: some of the phones have had a glitch. They crash. The forums have quite a few tales of anguish. The first version of the phone we got had the glitch and after a terrible weekend of taking the battery in and out, rebooting, and finally restoring—all to no avail, my very firm advice is to march that baby right back to the store. It’s not your fault, and it’s not your job to fix it. The phone is a true joy, there’s no reason to suffer. (We asked about the number of phones that might have had the problem. We didn’t get an answer, and at this point maybe it’s not known, but there are enough people complaining about the problem on the web, that I thought it worth mentioning. Again, life is short, take it back, get a new one.)

The Sony Ericsson Experia Play

The Experia Play is one of the most anticipated new phones out there. I know I anticipated it quite a bit. Unfortunately, anticipation is not working in the favor of this phone. Poor Sony, they’re having one of those Sony seasons that happens to them every so often in which nothing ever seems to go right. As this is being written, we’re waiting for Sony’s game network to come back up after a hacker revenge attack. It’s bad, it’s been real bad for Sony. It would have been great for this phone to be a huge, monster hit. It’s not.

First, the basics. The phone has a slide out Playstation controller and it includes the left, right buttons on the back of the device. For reasons known only to Sony, the buttons don’t seem to control much on the phone except games. It seems like there was probably a pretty big disconnect between the phone design and the game development side of Sony—which makes sense, Sony Ericsson and Sony Entertainment are different companies, really. It’s almost as if the controller was just attached to the phone. So, unless you’re really dying to play PSP type games, there’s not much added value to the controller. It would have seemed a great opportunity for additional navigation and selection controls in the OS or in apps, zooming, something. The thing adds quite a bit of expense, it should add more value.

Sony has made some bone-headed moves. To my mind, the camera is the best of the bunch. Although it’s not Sony’s top of the line Exmor 8 MP sensor, this 5 MP sensor works the best in low light. The Exmor R is a back-illuminated CMOS image sensor that provides much better performance in dark environments. The camera on the Play handles great but there’s no zoom. Really, no zoom. I looked all over the web thinking I was missing something. I can’t get over trying to push all those wonderful buttons on the device just in case they wake up and decide to become useful. No luck so far.

The device has hardware buttons for the bottom controls where most Android phones settle for soft – the search, return, home, and menu keys. They’re nice.

The phone feels great in the hand. It’s responsive and the screen looks good. Just as you’d expect: Sony can make good cameras and screens and blessedly they do for this phone. Also, Sony needs to be commended for including a decent pair of headphones with the Xperia Play. Thank you Sony, you put the competition to shame.

Weirdly, the phone doesn’t test well and if gamers are anything they are testers. They’re going to notice that the Experia Play doesn’t do well in the benchmarks. It seems just like that kid in the third grade who did lousy on tests and grew up to the be a physicist; the phone may not test well but just walking around, it performs much better than the tests would have you believe. It’s much snappier than the Droid 2. The Play wakes up and gets to work much faster than the G2X.

This is where it paid off to use the Droid 2 as a base, because in preliminary tests the Droid 2 did better than the Play. What? That can't be. I turned off all the background stuff on the Play, I turned the phone on and off and ... ah ha, the nifty Timescape theme added by Sony Ericsson keeps running. It’s a handy instant notifier of all your Facebook, Twitter, Google feeds. Turn it off before testing. That helped, quite a bit but I still think the benchmarks don’t do the phone justice.

I lost quite a bit of quality time playing “Bruce Lee” and “Crash Bandicoot” (really). There is something comforting and friendly about playing games with the controller, and I think it feels more immersive in many cases.

Prices for the unlocked phones are all over the place, but they seem to have settled into the range of $199 for a phone with a contract. Heck, they might as well give the things away for the amount of money that will be extracted from you during the life of the contract.

Benchmarks

Speed, so what am I basing my comments about speed on. Well first of all perception. The length of time it took to turn each on and get to the home screen from the lock screen; getting to the app screen from home; the perceived responsiveness of browsing on the screen; and performance in apps—all very subjective. Once they are up and running all three devices are fine.

For back up, we also ran the Standard Benchmark from Aurora and the AnTuTu System Benchmark.

What do we think?

Overall, the favorite in this bunch is the LG G2X. It’s pretty. It’s fast. The camera tells the rest of my cameras to go ahead and stay home, it’s got this one covered. One tiny complaint that’s driving me crazy? I can not figure out how to turn off the camera shutter sound —a passport to dork-land every time one uses the camera in a press conference or presentation. I’ll have to try and download another camera app, I reckon.

I wanted to like the Xperia Play. The camera is better. It’s really really fun. It’s responsive but there’s just some annoying features like the lack of a camera zoom. This phone could get a lot better with a firmware upgrade or maybe a rev. 2.

The Droid 2? What d’ya want? It’s my phone.