Yet Another Galaxy S vs Desire thread!

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nebucanazza

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Hey guys,

I know this topic has been done to death here as well as on the interwebs...and I have been burning the midnight oil reading it all up. But I am still horribly undecided at this point. I have demoed the Galaxy S but not the Desire. I'll try to bring up some specific questions which are bothering me. So here goes:

Overall looks and Build Quality - Big phail for the SGS here - the body plastic and the even the connectors/jacks were very substandard. How can I add solidity and class to this phone? Does a silicone case give it a feel similar to the Desire's rubberized body or is it a band-aid solution at the best? Is anyone doing aftermarket body replacements yet?

Screen - I am probably in a small minority here, as I have my doubts about the SAMOLED and AMOLED screens. I found the SGS screen to be a tad too bright and too colorful for my liking. This could purely be due to the gaudy TouchWiz UI though. I am not a fan of the PenTile layout and for rendering text it will always be the runner-up to a LCD, smoothness as well as power-wise. So I am actually excited about trying out the new SLCD screen on the Desire. Touch sensitivity is supposed to be better on the SAMOLED though. Anybody used these two side-by-side yet?

UI - Again, the Sense UI wins hands down. I strongly prefer classy understated themes and the SGS is totally at odds with that. How easy is it to fix this? People have talked about using ADW Launcher and the like. What will I be missing out if I go for that instead of custom UIs?

Email and Browser - HTC has the better solutions here and its browser has Flash.Can the SGS be easily bought at par by updates/apps?

Audio - I listen to a lot of music, primarily rock and metal. So I need something which is strong across the whole frequency range, especially bass and lower mids. The normal upper-mid and treble heavy voicing(which works for Bollywood/Pop/primarily vocal) just does not do it for me. Now, the SGS is supposed to be better here but just how bad is the HTC's audio quality for the discerning ear? I am guessing aftermarket apps should take care of support for different formats.I am not considering the loudspeakers as both are crap anyway. The Samsung earphones were of extremely shitty construction wise even compared to my 4 yr old SE W810i in-ear model. How does HTC fare on this front?

Video/multimedia - The SGS wins this one hands down..but..how much of practical issue is it really? Which current and near-horizon apps/games are that much better on the SGS?

Camera and recording - Even though the phone flash is mostly useless I think a torchlight is absolutely necessary on a phone, so HTC wins this but only on paper.Now Samsung is a veteran in the camera/video but does it translate to better performance on the phone or does HTC manage to hold its own? As the HTC will get 720p 30fps recording with Froyo, I guess it'll cover its biggest shortcoming soon.

Hardware - Primarily a Snapdragon vs Hummingbird debate. Now I have seen reports of Samsung having screwed up their I/O implementation, using a slow ROM and not having JIT. AFAIK these are all fixable with newer firmware? Is there anything majorly wrong with the architecture that won't be fixed by hacks/Froyo? What about support for Android 3.0? In terms of benchmarks, the Hummingbird absolutely mothers everything out there but the overall package implementation is far more important IMO.

Battery - The SGS packs a 1500mAh as compared to the Desire's 1400mAh. Quoted 2G talk times(only this matters in India right now) are significantly higher. The SGS wins hands down on paper but what is the real-life performance?

Customer support - HTC has a better record of putting out firmwares BUT in terms of service centers in India, it is pathetic. How does Samsung fare on this front, having been in India much longer? With such an expensive, complex and feature laden device one should be prepared for a couple of trips to the service center in the event of a likely malfunction.

I really want to like the Samsung and buy it but once I demoed the device; the build quality, TouchWiz and Samsung's default color schemes just put me off quite a bit. Now I am horribly confused and considering the Desire too. Why did you have to make things so difficult Samsung? :(

Sorry for the long-winded post but the devil always lies in the details...hoping for a good discussion.
 
I am in the same boat as you. My observations and reasoning:

Overall looks and Build Quality - SGS looks are a direct copy of the iPhone, I dont care about the build quality as long as it does not break. Desire otoh is beautiful

Winner : Desire

Screen - In love with the AMOLED and that too Super, just having OLED technology would give me goosebumps. I dont mind the (over ?)saturated color though and dont like the TouchWiz color scheme.. Pentile might turn out to be a b**ch with text but I have my heart set on the AMOLED and Im trying to justify it :P

Winner: SGS

UI - TouchWiz again is a copy of iOS. Samsung UI designers ought to be ashamed of themselves. Sense is awesome :) . If I get SGS Ill replace touchwiz with Launcher Pro or something

Winner: Desire

Email and Browser - Dont know, HTCs would be better most prob

Audio - I think I have read that SGS gives even the iphone/pod a run for its money in this dept. HTC would also be okay I think

Win: SGS

Video/multimedia - SGS wins here as well, HDMI out, HD playback, DivX support, beautiful display. Theres nothing that can even hold a candle to SGS

Win: SGS

Camera and recording - No flash? No problem... It would have been good for a torch but then you can also use the display for that, there are lots of apps

Hardware - Hummingbird and its PowerVR graphics chip kicks the snot out of Snapdragon. I have heard of issues with GPS and lagging, and there are fixes for that as well, but its a dirty business. HTC obviously has matured in this regard. And yeah.. theres no notification LED on SGS

Forgot to add, SGS has BT3 and WiFi N, even if you ignore BT3, WiFi N is definitely a plus for transferring files and movies from computer, if you have an n router

Win: SGS with a few caveats, this is the actual choke point, if there were no issues on SGS, it would have been the de-facto winner

Battery - I have heard bad things about Desires battery life and good things about SGSs.

Win: SGS

Customer support - No idea but samsung would have more service centres than HTC

One more addition:

3rd Party software: SGS has Swype, which is a paid application and Office doc editors. Desire only has a document viewer.

So, considering all the Wins above , I think SGS is better. Although, I am also a bit confused because of the lagging and GPS issue, if Samsung puts out an update which fixes this, then its bye bye to Desire. Even otherwise, I will most prob (90%) go for SGS only , if only for the AMOLED and raw power
 
@OP could you have been any more biased towards the desire?i think the whole point of the post is to bash the SGS.Even in areas where you admit samsung is better you still bash it.

Examples:

'Video/multimedia - The SGS wins this one hands down..but..how much of practical issue is it really?'

'Audio - I listen to a lot of music, primarily rock and metal. So I need something which is strong across the whole frequency range, especially bass and lower mids. The normal upper-mid and treble heavy voicing(which works for Bollywood/Pop/primarily vocal) just does not do it for me. Now, the SGS is supposed to be better here but just how bad is the HTC's audio quality for the discerning ear?'

what the hell?this thread is utter failure.
 
^ +1. After reading the TS mindless ramblings, I am not sure why the hell is he still horribly undecided. :|

I don't know about others but to me "Desire" has the ugliest design amongst other HTC phones.
 
Don't think this thread is supposed to be a question. Seems more like Galaxy S bashing to me. Go get the Desire as you seem to have already made up your mind.
 
Well, I was actually 90% decided on the SGS till I saw a demo piece. Specs and real life performance can be different. All I want to find out is whether the Desire's real-life performance is close at all to the SGS because specs wise it is inferior. As for the bashing and doubting, I prefer to find out the negative feedback about a product before buying it - the positive aspects are what drove me to consider it in the first place..just playing devil's advocate here.
 
In day to day use, Desire is faster at almost everything. It might have slower SOC, but the fluid UI, fantastic usable ui modifications, lag free operation does make it feel much more polished compared to SGS.

Audio quality on desire is not bad.

Coming to galaxy s from desire, first thing I noticed was choppy performance thanks to unoptimised UI. Even after firmware upgrade, and after applying lagfix scripts, its not as fluid as Desire on Eclair, forget about froyo.

You will get used to galaxy s if you buy it. But then you see the screen and 3d performance and everything is forgiven. :P (well almost)

nebucanazza said:
Well, I was actually 90% decided on the SGS till I saw a demo piece. Specs and real life performance can be different. All I want to find out is whether the Desire's real-life performance is close at all to the SGS because specs wise it is inferior. As for the bashing and doubting, I prefer to find out the negative feedback about a product before buying it - the positive aspects are what drove me to consider it in the first place..just playing devil's advocate here.
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This post is brought to you magically from Samsung Galaxy S using Tapatalk pro.
 
+1 for screen and hummingbird.

The screen alone is reason enough to go for SGS. The build looks and feel is fail, but the quality and sturdiness is a BIG win. It won't break at all, unless you drop it from a great height on solid concrete/surface.

And if you do plan to play around with your phone and install custom ROM's, SGS wins again. I anyways plan to install CM6 on my Vibrant(TMo's Galaxy S) and stay on that. And the Desire IMO is a bit old already, it just came to India so damn late. The Desire HD is releasing soon..
 
Both seem to be kickass phones, but to sum up whatever has been said here and elsewhere in an analogy, the Galaxy S is a Ferrari engine in a Maruti esteem body, whereas the Desire is a Mercedes engine in a Mercedes body. You cannot go wrong with either, and you cannot say that A is better than B, because really at the end of the day it's about preference.
 
Thanks guys..one more reason for considering SGS for me is that it might be better suited for a Gingerbread upgrade. Although this is far out and most probably won't be officially supported, the higher specs might just be able to manage the inevitable hacker created ROMs. And we all know that the custom UI complaints will be taken care of with it. I think I'll just bite the bullet and buy the SGS and hope that some enterprising soul creates an aftermarket backplate for it :P
 
vortex_mak said:
UI - TouchWiz again is a copy of iOS. Samsung UI designers ought to be ashamed of themselves. Sense is awesome :) . If I get SGS Ill replace touchwiz with Launcher Pro or something
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I think a lot of people are confused about TouchWiz 3. TouchWiz 3 on Galaxy S is a layer over stock android which includes not just a replacement for the stock home, but the customized notification panel, special apps and Tweaks. The only part of TouchWiz 3 that looks like an iPhone is the horizontal scrolling in application tray and if you don't like it, the same can be easily made to not look like the iPhone with a couple of clicks in the preferences. You can also easily replace the default home with another one of your choice (Launcher Pro for example), but there would still be parts of Touch Wiz running.
 
In the 10-15 minutes I have used the SGS, the things that stood out to me about Touchwiz were that the icons were bland and iPhone-ish, the 3D vertical scroll in menus was cheesy and very unpolished, the horizontal scrolling between different panes was tedious (as compared to the the pinch and zoom way in Sense UI) and general overall things didn't look very good for a 27k phone.

I may be wrong about them - just my initial impressions. And I know there are ways and means to make the UI look pretty cool, but I would have preferred if the stock UI itself is good (like in HTC phones) rather than having to resort to mods and tweaks.
 
I just had a cursory look over the UI and not sure what options are present for customising the look and feel.

What I am saying that the bottom 4 homescreen icons , the applications list and the phone design (the strip on the perimeter) all remind me of the iphone.

Surely , they could have done a better job for the default look.

The main reason I am saying is that I have frequent arguments on Android vs IPhone, with a friend of mine who has an iPhone and Ill really hate it if he says "copy of iphone" when he sees the interface.

This would not be the case with the Sense UI
 
^ but does this mean Samsung has used Gorilla Glass from the start, or that new batches will have it? The Press Release is a bit confusing, not to mention that if they have been using it from the start, why the hell would they not advertise this fact? All news on this subject is from the last 2 days - eh? :S
 
nebucanazza said:
Thanks guys..one more reason for considering SGS for me is that it might be better suited for a Gingerbread upgrade. Although this is far out and most probably won't be officially supported, the higher specs might just be able to manage the inevitable hacker created ROMs. And we all know that the custom UI complaints will be taken care of with it. I think I'll just bite the bullet and buy the SGS and hope that some enterprising soul creates an aftermarket backplate for it :P
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Desire and Galaxy are more or less same on the spec. The galaxy has a more powerful GPU and a different and bigged screen. Both these phones can support the gingerbread upgrade (Desire has more support with mods over @ xda)

My main turn off towards the SGS is the screen size. It's just too big for me to accept as a phone. :no:

I prefer to text with one hand...SGS owners, are you able to hold and use the phone with one hand?? I tired and I coudnt.
 
True..I have small hands and could barely manage to hold the SGS solidly. One handed operation is not possible for me too.On the positive side I don't think any phone over 4"/4.3" would be comfortable so screen size wise one can be future-proof. And for the Gingerbread upgrade, my line of reasoning was modern UIs will use more and more GPU acceleration and so the SGS should have an advantage.
 
^ Desire has a pretty decent GPU. it's just that SGS has a better one. An OS will never tax a GPU to it's max...otherwise it will not run on lower end hardware. so the Desire can stand up to the SGS on normal day to day performance . A GPU is pushed only while gaming (and benchmarking)

OS wise, desire is as capable as the SGS of running gingerbread.

Have you heared of the the dell streak?? It is a "phone" with a 5" screen ;);)
 
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