I had to stop at the Verizon store today to check on an issue I had with my phone. They had the Vortex on display so I played around with it. One thing I noticed right off the bat was that the display was much better on the Ally. It has a higher resolution and slightly bigger screen so reading text on web pages was much easier on the Ally.
As for performance, I was quite surprised at just how smooth the Vortex seemed to be and I noticed it right away simply by swiping the unlock button. Scrolling through the screens and scrolling the app list confirmed this as well. Very responsive. But that's where it pretty much ended. Everything else seemed to run just about the same speed as the Ally. Loading web pages, scrolling up and down a web page, etc. all ran about the same speed as the Ally which makes sense considering they are the same specs. The Vortex did come with a little more app space, 150mb compared to 128mb on the Ally. It was a nice little phone, but the inferior screen\display would keep me from ever buying this phone.
I also played around with the new Samsung Continuum, which was a really nice smaller phone, but I hated to ticker display at the bottom. I imagine it would be a battery killer and I couldn't see any way to disable it. Other than that though, it was about the same size as the Ally (same width, slightly taller), the screen was beautiful and the performance was fantastic. But the phone that really blew me away was the Fascinate. Too big for my tastes, but what a classy looking device that one is. Nice design, great performance, big screen, etc. If I was in to bigger phones, i'd pick that one over the Incedible or X.