Thunderbolt v. Bionic Speed Comparison

[slinky]

(I think no 1 year contracts are possible... monopoly practice)

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

The only phone not available on a 1-year contract is the iPhone, and that is Apple's doing, not VZW. There is no indication that any other phones will be offered without a 1-year contract option in the near future.

I'm not so sure. I understand this industry probably better than you think. The big four in the US control much of the pricing and policies that you seen. It's a virtual monopoly.

Regarding other phones, I don't see any 1 year prices advertised and I'm not quite sure as to the whether many of the new Android phones will be available with 1 year contracts.

 

[mark3748]

(I think no 1 year contracts are possible... monopoly practice)

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

The only phone not available on a 1-year contract is the iPhone, and that is Apple's doing, not VZW. There is no indication that any other phones will be offered without a 1-year contract option in the near future.

I'm not so sure. I understand this industry probably better than you think. The big four in the US control much of the pricing and policies that you seen. It's a virtual monopoly.

Regarding other phones, I don't see any 1 year prices advertised and I'm not quite sure as to the whether many of the new Android phones will be available with 1 year contracts.

Advertised with and available are two completely different things. Also, a lot of independent retailers avoid or straight out refuse to do 1-years, but that's the retailer, not Verizon.

Verizon lists every single phone (except the iPhone) with a 1-year, 2-year and no-contract option. What the future brings may be different, but it isn't happening for a phone to be released within the next month.

 

[slinky]

Advertised with and available are two completely different things. Also, a lot of independent retailers avoid or straight out refuse to do 1-years, but that's the retailer, not Verizon.

Verizon lists every single phone (except the iPhone) with a 1-year, 2-year and no-contract option. What the future brings may be different, but it isn't happening for a phone to be released within the next month.

I do know that AT&T doesn't offer some phones (if not almost all) with a 1 year contract. In many instances we've seen one set a price and all others follow suit. It's remarkable how much the cost of text messaging has gone up and the plans -- and it isn't because of the manual labor going up.

 

[metzor]

do you really need a phone faster than what has been shown in the tbolt videos?

Valid point.

 

[rushmore]

Unless you overclock the 8255 (GSM version), the Tegra 2 is far better in benchmark tests. They get closer once the 8255 is OC'd, but then you compromise battery life to get the chip to get to Tegra 2 level.

That said, the A5 and newer OMAP chip is better than the Tegra 2. Seem a little shark, big shark scenario.

Here is a good comparison site by a solid site for tech info. MyTouch chipset is GSM version of the TB. The other device is a Tegra 2.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/226?vs=342

added:

A good way to test is the N64 app. MyTouch 4G plays games slower than the gTablet, which has a Tegra 2. N64 app does not off-load to the GPU, so a good test for actual cpu power.

Still, will 99% of folks ever notice one is faster? Nope. Only game emulator rubes like me.

 

[Narsil]

do you really need a phone faster than what has been shown in the tbolt videos?

If you have to ask, then the answer is, "no; no you do not..."

 

[Haloman800]

And really for that matter, do we even need a phone? =P.

 

[JoshSB]

I have been reading up a lot of this and according to the info I have been reading, the dual core will be utilized by the 2.4 release.

And regardless of true software integration, you will get better battery life by the simple fact that if Google is good at all on programming (which I would say they are) they will load programs evenly on the cores (ex: one c ore is at 50% the other is at 25%, they will load new programs on the 25% one), which will allow the processor to be powered less overall and maintain the full power of the 1GHz.

 

[slinky]

And this is what concerns me. The battery rating is so low that you lose on both speed and efficiency. It seems that in 3 months a phone is coming out that is both (a) noticeably faster/snappier, and (b) potentially far more energy efficient, and (c) comes with a battery that is 25% more powerful, if not more.

While I love HTC in general, I think the 1300 mAh battery is a major design flaw and they hope to get away with this as "first mover" and the people will buy anything. Perhaps but we'll all have to fix this too and it will come at a price.

 

[BzB]

everyone made a big deal about the incredible battery at first and almost a year later it's still a huge success. granted there were several updates that have helped, and users also learned how to better manage the phone. personally i think battery issues are overstated. that said i can understand how some will make a bigger issue out of this than others, their needs may be different.

 

[kptphalkon]

Compromising battery life doesnt seem to be an issue from what the anand benchmark shows. For having a better brighter screen AND more battery life Id rather OC the 8255 chipset and find a compromise of performance vs life.

On the other hand, what if you OC both the qualcomm 8255 and the tegra2? The xoom hits 1.5 Ghz per core...

 

[slinky]

everyone made a big deal about the incredible battery at first and almost a year later it's still a huge success. granted there were several updates that have helped, and users also learned how to better manage the phone. personally i think battery issues are overstated. that said i can understand how some will make a bigger issue out of this than others, their needs may be different.

What are you talking about? The Incredible's battery was inadequate with 2.1 and just a little less inadequate with 2.2. I ended up blowing $50 to get a Seidio hump on discount (it was $60 or $70 at the time.) Fortunately that battery would last just over a day and into the second if I needed it. The stock battery was no better than half that.

 

[BzB]

exactly like i said. some people make a big deal out of battery life, yet in almost all cases those concerns don't affect the success of the phone. i use a 1500mah in my incredible and it lasts me from morning to late eve on a full charge. sure battery life could be comparatively better, but i can deal with it. if battery life were that big of a deal for me i'd get a blackberry.

 

[androidgeek]

IV seen a lot of people say the dual core will not matter because the software isn't up to date enough for the phone to use Its full potential. Makes sense I guess.. can + string on 2.1

So they say. But since Verizon intends to shackle you for 2 years and a lot happens during that time (I think no 1 year contracts are possible... monopoly practice) then that phone better last a long time. I would think that developers will take advantage of dual core before 2012 since the Bionic will already have one in it. That leaves for a long, long time to be stuck with a single processor.

That's why I put multiple lines on my account spaced out 1 year apart. I get an upgrade every year that way. Take that big red!

Sent from my PC36100 using DroidForums App

 

[Zetsumei]

At first this was sa major concern for me with single core vs dual core, but now I really could care less for the time being. Why? As per all the earlier posts at the moment for real word usage optimized single core > dual core. Will we see more and more optimizations in the near future for dual core phones? I would certainly hope so, but at this rate we cannot help but be skeptical about the software improvements. Honestly the droid phones could be a WHOLE lot better than they are right now ie w/ coding to optimize HW acceleration. Software updates from manufacaterers are slow and sparse, so in order to get those updates we as a community use custom ROMS.

But at the moment Motorola bootstrap is still locked, and for the moment seems to be no way around it to truly allow true customization (ie AOSP ROMS and Kernels). With this in mind you might have the physical hardware power, but what good is it if you get some trash software from motorola? Plus roms will be quite limited due to the locked bootloader. For the moment this is where HTC has the advantage over Moto, their "lock" was easily bypassed to allow full customized roms that aren't just based off of manufacterers software. This is why a huge amount of people are using the OG droid, even to this day you can get performance equal to most of the current droid phones due to the fact of allowance of full customization.

I went with the T-Bolt for that very fact, that and I wanted to lock in the unlimited 4G data plan on my contract . I ran some benches compared to my friends rooted Atrix as I have yet root / flash any ROMs on my Tbolt. When it came to linpack I obtained about 7-10 more Mflops, quadrant the atrix got about 200-300 more after 3 consecutive runs were done. First run both phones got approx 1800-1900, Neocore the Tbolt got about 8-10 more FPS (could be due to resolution). Smart bench the Atrix took the cake with about 800-1k + points more in productivity and a 800 + pt lead in gaming. People can either take these benches as the absolute pinnacle on how these phones will perform, or they can try the phones for themselves and then decide.

When I scrolled around w/ the atrix there were random pauses and freezes and overall seemed to be somewhat sluggish, but overall still smooth for craptacular blur. As for the Tbolt, to my eyes and friends scrolling was flawless and smooth. The app selection was smooth as well with no noticeable lag. Web browsing on the tbolt as well as browsing was smooth no jerkiness, with a few microstutters if you flick through a page that has a lot of pictures. Both phones handed multitasking well, opened up the same amount of apps and browser windows and no noticeable degrade in performance on both phones.

In the end I'm sure dual core will superceed single core as the evolution of smartphones continues. The key question is when? I really doubt anything will make single core phones obsolete in the next year or so. Both computers and smart phones have the same issues, more cores , more possibilty of raw computing power , lack of software/coding to support them. Good example of this is that Froyo has been out since June, most modern games don't support/optomize anything beyond 2 cores, and theres only a handful that I know will benefit from quad/hexa. Yes there are certain tasks that will benefit from more cores regardless of software optimization and I'll just leave it at that.

In the end everyone needs to remember it's just a phone, and I can easily say that most people don't even use all the functions that it has available. Don't get me wrong I would love to see the continued evolution of processors for phones, but at the sametime software, memory and battery need to follow suit in order for it to make the difference that everyone desires.

/end rant