This article was published on January 12, 2010

Nexus One, Droid: Fast, but Still Not iPhone


Nexus One, Droid: Fast, but Still Not iPhone

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The folks over at Moto — just Moto, no relation to the big M — took a look at the four leading phones in the market right now that sport capacitive touchscreen technology, and for lack of a better meme; obvious comparison results are obvious.

From left to right: iPhone 3GS, Droid Eris, Droid, and the Nexus One. Of the four phones, the iPhone was the only phone to consistently prove accurate enough to draw straight lines with a light finger touch. What’s so important about drawing diagonal lines properly? Well, for starters, it’s an excellent test of the accuracy of a capacitive touchscreen. The more accurate the lines in this test, the more accurate your finger can be hitting tiny letters on a tiny keyboard. The results are interesting to say the least, and for a couple of the heavy-hitters in the line-up, even a little damning.

It’s not made clear why they chose not to include the Nexus One in the video presentation of the test, but it’s likely they didn’t get ahold of the unit until the video was already filmed. Regardless of its inclusion in the actual video footage, the test was run, and it was part of the final line-up comparison. The test showed that under light pressure, the Droid Eris, while cheaper than its big brother, faired better than the Droid. The Nexus One did terribly in the same test, while performing much better under moderate to heavy pressure. The iPhone did spectacularly well in both pressure tests.

That Said…

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Google is doing very well, in just about every area it involves itself — which is slowly becoming all areas — and the Nexus One is a milestone in the company’s involvement in the mobile phone market. It’s a good phone, and nobody can really say otherwise, but despite its speedy hardware and more mature Android base, this test shows that processor speed isn’t everything.

A recent teardown of the so-called Google Phone, by iSuppli, has shown that the per-unit cost is only $5 USD cheaper than that of the iPhone 3GS. In that comparison, the iPhone has 12gb more storage space to boot. Even with the Snapdragon speeding things along, it becomes very apparent that the Nexus One is no Nexus Six. Not yet, anyway.

One thing’s for absolute certain here — Artist Jorge Colombo wouldn’t be able to do what he does on the Nexus One, much less a Droid.

Image credits: Moto, Warner Bros.

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