Apple iPhone 4 vs. Samsung I9000 Galaxy S
It’s not like you’re out of options. Here’s one. Another one would be to get a friend’s iPhone 4 and another friend’s Galaxy S, put them on a table, close your eyes and… tell your friends to bugger off. Or you can do it the old-fashioned way. Flip a what?
Now seriously, do we need another iPhone vs. insert phone of choice thing? Well, do you need Retina display when it’s more than the human eye can see? Do you need a 4” Super AMOLED when 3.5” would’ve been just fine – and easier to handle?
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Yes, we’ll be comparing the best screens in business. But it’s not even the beginning of what this is all about. There’s not just muscle being flexed here – it’s about ideology too. It’s open source Android against control freaks Apple, democracy against the royalty.
And technically, the Samsung Galaxy S is not alone in this fight. It’s backed by an army of overseas mercenaries, marching to take on the Apple phone on different markets: Samsung Vibrant, Samsung Captivate and the Epic 4G.
The different call signs aside, we have two of the best phones you can get today and this is not a kill-or-get-killed game. The first thing we try to find out when reviewing phones is who they are for. The tech inside is always exciting but ultimately it all comes down to whether the right users are getting the right treatment.
The specs are the players – the phone is the team. You can always tell a star player. But the winning team isn’t always the one with the better players. And sometimes you don’t even want to look at the score. That’s when we know it’s been a hell of a game.
Samsung Galaxy S over Apple iPhone 4
- Android 2.1 Éclair, 2.2 Froyo update just around the corner
- 4” SuperAMOLED display with a 15:9 widescreen aspect ratio
- Regular SIM card support
- DivX/XviD video support
- FM radio with RDS
- Notably cheaper
Apple iPhone 4 over Samsung Galaxy S
- iOS 4
- 640 x 960 pixel Retina display
- Scratch-resistant, high-quality glass panels
- LED flash
- Precise movement tracking via a gyro sensor
It’s Android’s finest against the iPhone but that’s how we tend to look at it on our side of the pond. The truth is, there are meaner and keener droids out there. The Motorola DROID X and the HTC Evo 4G are obviously not part of our story but are the kind of phones to merit a place in history.
Anyway, there’s enough firepower here even without the US heavyweights. Screen and OS are the most powerful weapons of both the Galaxy S and the iPhone 4. SuperAMOLED came first and impressed the world but now the Retina display is claiming the crown.
With platforms it’s a mirrored image of the same events: iOS (known as iPhone OS at the time), redefined touchscreen usability but Android claims to have leapfrogged it with Froyo.
To further complicate things, even absolutely identical specs don’t produce the same performance. The cameras on both devices may look similar but the rival camps took a completely different approach to processing – that holds true for both still imaging and video recording.
At times, it will look like the Galaxy S is competing against a first-gen iPhone. There are still things Apple will never bother put in their phones. Elsewhere, the Samsung Galaxy S might find it hard to match the stature and eloquence of the iPhone. That’s how we like it though – punches flying both ways. Be right back.
Design and construction
Say what you will about specs but they’re not the first thing you notice about a handset. What we have here is some amazing pieces of technology – phones you’ll want to show off. But a touchscreen bar isn’t exactly the form factor to let designers unleash their creativity. Plus, a large, bright, high-res screen is enough to make any handset a looker.
We have two completely different approaches here. Design is a rather broad concept: there’s handling and ergonomics – and there’re engineering choices that affect the actual performance. In terms of pure looks though, the iPhone is having a walkover here.
Apple deserves much credit for the styling of their latest phone. They did a complete overhaul of one of the most minimalist designs ever. The iPhone 4 has the right measures of simplicity and sophistication. And it’s all meaningful. It’s the latest in a line of phones that redefined user-friendliness but it’s the next generation too in features and technology.
Samsung on the other hand, don’t seem to care too much about the packaging. The Galaxy S does little to stand out among the multitude of affordable mass-market touch phones that the company has been churning out. The simple and plasticky phone is quite in line perhaps with Android’s egalitarian nature.
Simplicity was key for Apple too, but premium finish for their latest and greatest must’ve been a matter of noblesse oblige. Some of Apple’s innovative design solutions are questionable to say the least but the glass-covered, metal-framed iPhone 4 is a joy to behold.
Choosing an all-plastic case for the I9000 Galaxy S, Samsung were able to keep the phone’s weight to the incredible 119 grams (the iPhone 4 weighs in at 137 g). Quite an achievement this one – don’t forget we’re talking a 4″ screen. Among other things, the plastic body makes the Galaxy S much cheaper to make too.
Now depending on how you look at it, the lower weight might be an advantage, as it makes the handset less of a burden in the pocket, or a disadvantage, as it takes away some of the solid feel we’ve come to expect in premium phones.
The glossy plastic body of the Galaxy S doesn’t look quite so nice after a short while – it doesn’t take long for it to become a greasy mess. The rear of the phone is less affected by this unpleasant effect. The bluish dots on the back cover were also an attempt perhaps to give the premium handset a bit of personality. The subtle holographic depth effect might have seemed relevant to the phone’s name too.
One aspect where the Galaxy S does beat the iPhone 4 however is handling. The Samsung handset has a subtle chin at its back that makes the handset both comfortable and more secure to hold. A 4″ screen does push the limits of comfortable single-handed use but the Galaxy S feels good in the hand – especially with the tapered edges, which previous iPhones had too.
The Apple’s latest on the other hand has top-notch finish but this is somehow at the expense of secure handling. The iPhone 4 is so slick and smooth with all that glass up and front that it makes you take extra care not to drop it.
This brings us to the next aspect of design – durability. Firstly, the iPhone 4 has a clear advantage as far as day-to-day wear and tear is concerned. The scratch-resistant glass panels can suffer quite a lot of abuse and will look as good as day one.
However glass, sturdy as it may be, is still pretty sensitive to dropping. Early tests showed that the iPhone can survive landing on its face, but falling on a side is likely to cause a nasty crack on the front or bacl. And with glass panels that are pretty hard to replace this is not something you want to have to deal with.
A bumper case is usually good enough to stay out of trouble but those cheap looking (but pretty expensive to buy) pieces of plastic do take away quite a lot of the device’s appeal.
The plasticky Galaxy S on the other hand is far easier to scratch but is less vulnerable to dropping. Not to mention that replacing its full-face back panel is far easier and cheaper and requires less technical knowledge. We’d rather call it a tie here.
Telephony
The fact aside that telephony is still one of the main jobs of a mobile phone, we don’t think we would have normally included such a chapter in a shoot-out. But this has quite a lot to do with design, as many unfortunate iPhone 4 users have come to learn the hard way.
If you are reading this, chances are you already know everything there is to know about the so-called Antennagate. In the end, it’s not about a weak spot in a phone that’s pitched as the pinnacle of evolution. It’s about how Apple handled the whole thing.
Apple thought it had nailed it with their all-new antenna design giving the iPhone 4 better signal reception than any iPhone before it plus keeping thing as compact as they come. But it didn’t quite work the way they hoped. It could’ve been an oversight. Or they knew contact with skin will most certainly interfere with the antenna and cause the phone to lose signal – but didn’t care to act when they should have.
Either way, the thing was blown out of proportion, fueled by Apple’s own high-octane mix of arrogance and denial. It seems it’s all heading towards a happily-ever-after. Our own tests showed iPhone’s reception was mostly problematic in areas of spotty coverage . And bumper cases are certain to sort all issues out.
Of course not every iPhone 4 owner is happy to have a piece of plastic wrapped around their shiny handset. Not to mention that depending on the bumper you choose it might take up to 3 months for it to arrive. Not quite the best way to treat the customers, who paid good money for your device.
And to make matters worse, the antenna isn’t the only problem of the iPhone 4. Proximity sensor issues have been reported since day one and this has nothing to do with external factors like the cellular network. We’ve done our own investigation into the issue and you can see, the problem is very much real.
The proximity sensor on the iPhone 4 is somewhat buggy and the screen will sometimes turn on even though you are holding the phone right next to your face. Accidental presses are likely resulting sometimes in dropped or muted calls, which can be quite annoying. At least Apple owned up to this one and promised a fix in the next iOS version (in fact the iOS 4.1 beta is already available and early reports suggest it does fix things up).
Next up is video calling. The Apple FaceTime videochat service only works over Wi-Fi (unless you have a jailbroken device) and both parties must have an iPhone 4. So it’s not exactly the most widely adopted option for video chats.
The Galaxy S has video-calling enabled too. And what do you know, the other person doesn’t even have to have a Galaxy S, just any 3G handset will do (well, okay, most of them). The Galaxy S also brings contact widgets, quick contacts and that neat little feature that allows you to dial or text a contact in your phonebook by a swipe gesture.
Apple iPhone 4: 4/10 • Samsung I9000 Galaxy S: 9/10
Display
This is where it gets serious. The best displays in business, the pride and joy of Samsung and Apple.
In the Galaxy S corner is a 4” SuperAMOLED display of WVGA resolution (800 x 480 pixels). Across the ring we have the iPhone 4 and the Retina display – a 3.5” S-IPS LCD unit at 960 x 640 pixels. Both of course have support for up to 16M colors, so banding isn’t an issue.
There isn’t much to say about the sensitivity of the two touchscreens either – they are both superb. We see capacitive at its best here and with screens this big and interfaces so well optimized you’re likely to enjoy yourselves.
The SuperAMOLED technology is superior to LCD, especially on hand-held where its relatively shorter life span doesn’t really count. The iPhone 4 has higher nominal resolution, for finer, sharper image quality.
Besides the LCD mounted on the iPhone 4 has out-of-this-world viewing angles and manages to do something we never believed possible. It turns out that from extremely tight viewpoints the iPhone actually looks a bit better. However, considering that no one actually looks at their phone screen from such steep angles it’s a fact interesting to scientists but irrelevant to users.
Now for the resolution – the iPhone 4 is certainly impressively sharp, with pixel density unmatched by a GSM phone. No matter how close you look at it, it’s virtually impossible to see individual pixels. That’s certainly a welcome upgrade over previous iPhones, which had incredibly low pixel density but is not to say that the Galaxy S is the sad loser here.
Right on the contrary – the Samsung I9000 with its WVGA resolution is pretty sharp too. What’s more, the way you normally hold your phone (at just under an arm’s length away from your eyes) the difference between the two is hardly that big.
Even at that distance, however you can easily see the superior contrast of the Galaxy S SuperAMOLED screen. Those kind of displays, unlike LCDs, are able to display pitch-black and much more saturated colors in general, which is really what we all want to see. It’s also what makes the difference when watching a movie on your mobile phone, giving the Galaxy S an edge here.
And speaking of video playback, the Galaxy S has another advantage over the iPhone 4. Its widescreen 15:9 display is much better suited for watching movies, which all tend to come in 16:9 aspect ratio or even wider. You still need to lose a small part (where black bars appear) of the screen or crop the edges of the frame, but the iPhone has it much worse here.
Still camera
The 5 megapixel snappers of the two devices in question are not their key selling points. You can get better still imaging on a phone for half the price. Yet it doesn’t hurt to have a quality camera on board and with the specs so evenly matched it was inevitable that we will compare them.
The iPhone 4 sets off to a good start here with its LED flash. Not that it is that much good with its limited range but the Galaxy S has nothing to offer in return so it’s still an advantage.
As we said in the introduction, despite the similar specs the two cameras actually have completely different outputs. The iPhone 4 doesn’t process its photos much, fighting with chroma noise, but leaving luminance noise alone. The Galaxy S on the other hand tries to eradicate all kinds of, which given the qualities of the cameraphone sensors easily results in lost detail.
Video recording
While a 5 megapixel still camera won’t inspire any geek, the 720p video recording most certainly will. There is still no mobile phone on the GSM market capable of recording anything better than the 720p@30 fps movies that those two offer. And all that processing power has allowed for pretty decent quality of the videos too.
The LED flash of the iPhone 4 matters more here as it can be used as a video light. Again, it’s range is limited but videos need less light than still photos so it’s certainly good to have one of those.
And again it’s the Galaxy S striking back with a more functional, but still well organized camcorder interface. Of course nothing can beat the iPhone 4 for simplicity of use but that’s just because it has no options whatsoever.
Those crops are taken from the following videos (combined in a playlist). You can open them fullscreen to see the difference more easily. It’s like the iPhone was made to shoot test charts like this one – it’s that good.
No matter how good its imaging system is, the Apple iPhone 4 is again let down but its poorly chosen metering mode and white balance. The iPhone 4 uses an frame average metering (sometimes called matrix) meaning that the moment something dark comes in the edge of your frame the middle of its gets overexposed.
And as far as mobile videos go, it’s what in the center that you normally want perfectly exposed, so the Samsung Galaxy S is wiser to use center-weighted average. That’s a metering system, which gives more importance to the objects in the center of your frame.
Again oversaturation is quite noticeable on the iPhone 4 and combined with the erroneous light balance can often lead to unnaturally looking videos and loss of detail due to individual channel(s) clipping. No to mention the inaccurate skin tones, which occur often and are rather bothering.
The Galaxy S gives you more natural (though slightly duller) videos by default and you will need to fiddle with its settings if you want a different result. You can do little to make up for the lower detail levels though.
The approaches the two manufacturers to exposure compensation are again rather different. The iPhone 4 makes rapid step-by-step adjustments to shutter speed and that allows it to adjust faster when light conditions are changing but the sharp changes look pretty bad in the video itself.
The Galaxy S on the other hand takes its time, but gives you smoother compensation that is not as objectionable, much like a dedicated digicam.
So at this point the two competitors seem pretty comparable with scales tipped in the iPhone 4 favors. However it’s again a wrong step on the Apple side that turns the tables in the end.
See the thing is the iPhone 4 crops a large portion of its sensor in video mode, giving you a field of view of about 48mm in 35mm equivalent. That’s less than 75% of the field-of-view you have in still imaging. We find this rather uncomfortable for shooting videos (it’s like you have zoomed in a bit all the time), as it’s harder to fit everybody in the frame.
We’d take 28mm for shooting videos any day but since none of the two competitors offers that, 35mm is what we would go for. And that combined with the several processing shortcomings of the iPhone 4, gives the Galaxy S the win here.
We hope Apple will fix many of those in a future firmware version and will make better use of the huge potential of their camera sensor and optical system. In fact if they do that and decide to use the whole sensor for shooting videos, rather than just the center part (thus stretching the field of view down to 38mm) we would gladly take it over the Galaxy S for movie recording. But for now, the iPhone processing is just too immature to stand a chance.
Music player
Ample high-quality screens, vast storage space and loads of processing power – the iPhone 4 and the Galaxy S are both great portable multimedia players. But it takes more than that to reach perfection and we are about to see which of them walked the extra mile.
On one hand you have the iPhone 4 with its iPod pedigree, making a really strong candidate. The iPhone 4 is also the handset with the cleanest audio output we have seen and one of the loudest, too (when using headphones).
The Galaxy S audio quality is great but not iPhone 4-perfect.
For this shootout we decided to do something more than our usual audio quality test and recorded each of the handsets twice. The first two rows of the table below contain the numbers we usually publish – this is the performance of the handset when plugged into an active amplifier (i.e. your car stereo or your home audio system). It’s the best the handsets can deliver as there is no additional resistance they have to deal with.
The second two rows show the actual performance of the iPhone 4 and the Galaxy S when a pair of headphones is plugged. We used a pair of AKG headphones with impedance of 32 ohms. As you can see both handsets audio quality slightly deteriorated but it still remained perfect for almost all purposes practical.
The stereo crosstalk is the only area that took a serious hit (mostly so with the Galaxy S), so leakage between the channels is more pronounced but everything else is great. Still it’s easy to notice that the iPhone 4 gets an edge when headphones are connected, which is the only thing that matters to most of the users. The creators of the iPod certainly knew what they were doing here.
Video player
The Samsung Galaxy S brings a larger screen with much better contrast, making it perfect for watching videos. It also sports a much more suitable screen aspect ratio, allowing widescreen movies to fit better and waste less screen estate. And with native DivX and XviD support, chances are you won’t need any video conversion kung-fu too.
Then of course, there’s battery life too. You can only play so many movies as your batter lasts. In our recent dedicated battery test the Samsung Galaxy S went on playing our test DivX video sample for some good 7 hours and 25 minutes before the battery fell below 10%.
Browsing the web
At their core, the browsers inside the iPhone 4 and the Galaxy S are the same. They’re both derivatives of the WebKit project. It’s the same layout engine and both phones are evenly matched as far as page rendering goes.
The difference essentially is in what Apple and Samsung have chosen to package the renderer with. The clearest example of such differences is Flash – it’s not that the Galaxy S has a proper support, but at least it has Flash Lite 3 and the full Flash experience is on its way with the eagerly awaited Froyo update in September. You may’ve even caught a glimpse already of our experience with the latest test firmware.
The iPhone on the other hand will hardly ever dip its toes in Flash waters.
There are other things too of course. Text reflow (making sure text fits on the screen so it’s easier to read) is another point in favor of the Galaxy S, as are the find on page and save page features, as well as the download manager.
Hold on, don’t declare victory for the Samsung Galaxy S just yet, the Apple iPhone 4 has a few advantages of its own, which might be more important to you than the Find-On page feature.
To begin with it’s impressively fast. You’ll see that clearly when we get to the benchmarks. Also, it pioneered some of the usability features used in almost all touch browsers today and it’s still one of the easiest browsers to handle. And the latest Safari that comes on the iPhone 4 is clearly better than the older versions. The improved address suggestion is a good one to note, not to mention that it finally has background wep page loading, so you can do other stuff while you wait on a heavy website to load up.
There are differences between the two phones that are not software related. The iPhone 4 Retina display has the upper hand in terms of resolution.
It’s hard to call this one as it comes down to the individual user. The sharper, higher-res display on the iPhone 4 makes sure text is readable at even very low zoom levels, while the SuperAMOLED on the Galaxy S has more zooming latitude stretching half an inch longer.
The Mobile Safari browser on the Apple iPhone 4 is a bit faster than the Android Browser on the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S when loading a page for the first time. At reloading however Safari can be faster by quite a margin.
It still has the advantage in JavaScript performance but the test Froyo firmware for the Galaxy S shows potential to overtake Safari. Not much has been done to improve Acid3 performance though where the iPhone 4 scores a perfect 100/100.
Application base and handling and App stores
OK, it’s open source Android against control freaks Apple. It’s iPhone users who are habituated into paying for their apps against Android and its tons of free content. App stores are a key value-adding feature of today’s smartphones. And they are massive money makers for their owners.
The iPhone App Store has much more apps than the Android Market. The Market passed 100,000 apps and it’s still playing catch-up – that’s how big the Apple App Store is. The Android Market can hardly make up the lack of quantity with quality too.
Take games for example – because of Android OS limitations, games cannot be very big so the Android Market offers mostly simple games. The Apple App Store on the other hand has some really exciting and elaborate games, the new gyroscopes in the iPhone 4 make them even more fun.
Of course, the limitation will be lifted from the Samsung Galaxy S with the Froyo update but we run into another problem – platform fragmentation. Almost half of Androids run v1.5 Cupcake or v1.6 Donut, and there are quite a number of droid phones with different display resolution.
This limits the potential market for an app or game, which in turn limits the number of developers willing to create apps for just that part of the user base. There’s some fragmentation in the App Store too, but it’s much less prominent.
The iPhone 4 can run every iPhone app under the sun. iPad apps are not compatible but that’s not a loss really. The iPad apps are mostly variants of their iPhone counterparts – if an app is available for the iPad, there’s probably a version of that app for the iPhone. Differences between iPhone 4 and iPad apps are caused mainly by the physical difference between screen sizes – nothing can be done about that.
“App Store”, “Market”… Clearly they’re meant to sell stuff so let’s get to the topic of money. The Android Market is a haven for free apps (more than half of the apps are free), but the truth is that it’s money that brings in a large number of developers – they make mobile apps for a living.
Here, the iPhone 4 has the clear advantage – the App Store is more profitable and even for free apps, there’s the iAds service which can generate revenue indirectly. Google recently bought AdMob and it’s a safe bet that they’ll put some effort into creating a similar service. But right now, Apple promises the bigger pay off for devs’ hard work.
That’s just one side of the coin though – the other is how users pay. Buying an app on the Apple iPhone 4 is nice and simple – users have an account linked to their credit card. On the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S, you have to use Google Checkout and few people use that service much – if at all.
On the other hand, the Android Market has great return policy. If you uninstall a paid app up within 24 hours from purchase, the Market will give you a refund. If you find out the app you just bought isn’t as useful as you though it would be, this can be quite a cash saver.
Let’s go back to the developers for a moment – Apple have angered quite a few devs with their obscure and inconsistent approval system. They also limit what kind of apps can be in the App Store, which often means iPhone 4 users don’t have access to some apps.
Take Google Voice for example – it’s a great management tool if you have to juggle several phone lines, especially if some are just for work and others personal. But Apple with their “no duplication” policy don’t allow the Voice app into the App Store. Google went around this and created a web app you can use instead, but it’s not as good. The Samsung Galaxy S can run the native app no problem.
Of course there’s the issue of multitasking. Android has true multitasking – it can suspend an idling app when it runs low on recourses but the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S has plenty of RAM and can run multiple apps simultaneously without breaking a sweat.
The iOS4 and Apple iPhone 4 situation is different though – it can very convincingly fake multitasking with apps that support it, but it’s not true multitasking – at least not for the most part. Only a handful of apps get the green light for running properly in the background. And if your favorite app has not been updated to support any of that fast app switching or multitasking, then you’re stuck with the same limitations older OS versions and iPhones had. But still, users hardly ned all apps to run in the background, so perhaps that’s not such a big letdown.
Apple iPhone 4: 9/10 • Samsung I9000 Galaxy S: 8/10
Wrap up
Well, here we are at the end of our grand battle. We tried to be as helpful as possible to everyone wondering which of the two best smartphones currently available to purchase. There’s a reason why we won’t add up the individual scores for each phone – different people have different needs and you should count only the scores on the chapters that are important to you.
And don’t take our word for granted – you are free to disagree with our reasoning. After all, every person out there uses their phones in a different way. That’s the beauty of it – the latest and greatest smartphones can do so much for you that you can even afford to not use some of the available features and still have a great experience.
There’s no ultimate smartphone out there and the right choice boils down to the compromises you are willing to make. Price is important factor too and currently the iPhone 4 is probably the most expensive smartphone on the market (contract-free). Bu then again, Apple gadgets are almost always the most expensive among their kind and still, they sell quite well.
