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HTC Vivid vs Skyrocket vs Droid Razr

Mozahsuf

Newbie
Sep 16, 2011
14
1
Dear respected community of android sages,

I am hoping to hear from some of the more tech-savvy people out there wrt the specs of these three phones (vivid, skyrocket, droid) and why one may outshine the others. From what I understand, the Vivid is basically an outdated HTC Sensation equipped with the requisite antennas to function on AT&T's nascent LTE network, while the Skyrocket is obviously an offshoot of the six month old Galaxy S2.

One subquestion I have concerns the differences between the S2 and the skyrocket; other than the LTE connectivity and physical differences, what separates them from each other? Is the hardware on one significantally different than the other's?

Finally, how do these new phones compare against the Droid Razr? Or even the Galaxy nexus? I'm mainly referring to hardware issues, since the software and physical differences are well-known and need no review here.
 
Dear respected community of android sages,

I am hoping to hear from some of the more tech-savvy people out there wrt the specs of these three phones (vivid, skyrocket, droid) and why one may outshine the others. From what I understand, the Vivid is basically an outdated HTC Sensation equipped with the requisite antennas to function on AT&T's nascent LTE network, while the Skyrocket is obviously an offshoot of the six month old Galaxy S2.

One subquestion I have concerns the differences between the S2 and the skyrocket; other than the LTE connectivity and physical differences, what separates them from each other? Is the hardware on one significantally different than the other's?

Finally, how do these new phones compare against the Droid Razr? Or even the Galaxy nexus? I'm mainly referring to hardware issues, since the software and physical differences are well-known and need no review here.

To start, the Galaxy S II is not 6 months old. It was released on Oct 2nd 2011 just over 1 month ago.

From what I understand the Skyrocket is the Galaxy S II with an LTE Radio and a different but very comparable processor. I don't believe there are any other differences.

Weather to go with the Vivid or Skyrocket has been my question. If you look at the specs and the newly released Benchmarks for each device the Skyrocket wins hands down. But in the past I have had the original Galaxy S and several Samsung Windows Mobile devices. Man are they slow to release bug fixes and OS upgrades. I really wish AT&T would release a top phone that isn't an Apple or Samsung divice.

With all my Samsung devices I end up resorting to Cooked ROMS. I use my phone for business and need reliability. Cooked ROM's don't exactly offer reliability.
 
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I had the SGSII for couple weeks now.

The screen has the blue tint which is ennoying. Besides that great phone. I will be exchanging it with the new one tomorrow, obviously.

The Vivid screen will be better resolution and no blue color cast. It will be a little narrower from what I see in the reviews. How ever I will be concerned about the battery life. Typically most HTC phones had very bad battery life.

So having said that, which would you go with and why? On ATT, that is.
 
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Vivid is basically an outdated HTC Sensation equipped with the requisite antennas to function on AT&T's nascent LTE network, while the Skyrocket is obviously an offshoot of the six month old Galaxy S2.

The Vivid is very simalar to the Sensation, it's just got a bigger screen.

However the Galaxy S2 Skyrocket is not 6 months old, it does not share the same SoC as the original SGS2, the screen is larger and it has LTE.

The orginal SGS2 may be over 6 months old but it's still the fastest Android phone on the market thanks to Samsungs Exynos SoC.
 
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From what I've read so far, here is where each stands out.

Droid Razr:
+High build quality. Motorola is known for this.
+qHD display, so a little higher resolution than most android phones
-pentile display, so there may be some artifacting.
-IMO motorola has one of the weaker UIs. I use go laucher on my moto atrix anyway.

SGS II Skyrocket:
+Super amoled+ screen so you will get the deepest blacks and most vibrant colors here and it will not have artifacting since it is non pentile.
-Low resolution for such a big screen.

HTC Vivid:
+Super LCD qHD display, so it has a little higher res display than most android phones. Also super lcd will have better blacks and colors than the standard lcd screens, but still not as good as super amoled. No artifacting since it is non pentile.
+Arguably the best android ui, other than stock android 4.0 in my opinion.
+/- It looks like its kind of thick, but due to the qHD form factor, it isn't that wide.
- Relatively small battery matched with an lcd screen which doesn't have the power savings of super amoled. HTC is notorious for putting small batteries in their phones.

I'm not commenting on processor speed because they are all dual core and fast so any differences aren't that relevant. I only tried to point out the things that might matter. Personally, I would probably get the HTC vivid, or the Droid RAZR if I were on Verizon. I would be happy with either and not bother switching carriers.
 
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From what I've read so far, here is where each stands out.

Droid Razr:
+High build quality. Motorola is known for this.
+qHD display, so a little higher resolution than most android phones
-pentile display, so there may be some artifacting.
-One of the weaker UIs.

SGS II Skyrocket:
+Super amoled+ screen so you will get the deepest blacks and most vibrant colors here and it will not have artifacting since it is non pentile.
+Best Battery life of the three thanks to the SAMOLED Plus screen and 1850 mAh battery.
+Fastest UI on any Android Phone to date.
+Stock Video Player supports allot more video formats
-Low resolution for such a big screen.

HTC Vivid:
+Super LCD qHD display, so it has a little higher res display than most android phones. Also super lcd will have better blacks and colors than the standard lcd screens, but still not as good as super amoled. No artifacting since it is non pentile.
+Arguably the best android ui, other than stock android 4.0 in my opinion.
+/- It looks like its kind of thick, but due to the qHD form factor, it isn't that wide.
- Relatively small battery matched with an lcd screen which doesn't have the power savings of super amoled. HTC is notorious for putting small batteries in their phones.
-Worst CPU Performance of the three

Made a few modifications, I'll leave in the part about sense arguably being the best in even though it's a laggy resource hog which will eat half the memory. Maybe the 256MB extra memory on the Vivid will stop users getting out of memory errors like the Sensation.. :D
 
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I went in and compared Vivid and Skyrocket side by side yesterday.

First thing I did was bump up both screens to full brightness. They were about the same in regards to brightness, but I did like Vivid's higher res screen better. The Skyrockets icons/text seemed a little bit bigger due to the lower resolution - which I also kind of liked. If I had to choose one display I liked, it would be the Vivid's.

Next I downloaded Quadrant on both. I then rebooted them at the same time. Samsung's reboot time is around 1/3 of what HTC's is. I didn't time it in seconds, but the Skyrocket was done running quadrant before the HTC even got back to the unlock screen.

As for Quadrant results, I was very disappointed and surprised by the Vivid's lower score. I ran it 3 times on each device: average score of 2018 for the Vivid and 3121 on the Skyrocket.

Benchmark results aren't the be all/end all though, and both phones did seem quick enough. I did notice that the skyrocket was quicker flipping through screens left & right than the Vivid. It could just be that Sense and TouchWiz are different though.

My next comparison was the interface itself. I liked Sense much better than TouchWiz. It just seemed more intuitive for me. I'm a bit biased though because I have an HTC Inspire w/sense as my work phone - so it's what I'm used to.

I tried the camera, well as much as I could while it was attached to the security tether. Both were very quick w/little shutter lag. The HTC was a tad quicker in snapping the picture. I think it was the autofocus - HTC would focus right away, Samsung would due a quick 1 second autofocus every time you hit the shutter button.

Front facing camera's were also about the same, but on the display the skyrocket's looked less grainy.

Lastly I was browsing the web, both were on Wifi in teh store since LTE isn't scheduled for my area until early next year. Websites loaded a little faster on the skyrocket, but not by much.

Overall they're close, but I think right now I'm going with the Skyrocket. That ~35% increase in benchmark score is just too big to deny. Also, the skyrocket has a 1850MaH battery, while the HTC only has a 1620MaH one.

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I know this is android forums, but does anyone have thoughts on WP7.5? I was playing with the Focus S and I was really impressed. First time i've even looked at a WP, and didn't know what to test. I liked the menu/grid thing though. The thing that turns me off is Bing (I hate bing vs google) and xbox live (I don't have an xbox or xbox live account).
 
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