2defmouze's Official Bionic vs Gnex Comparison
Since there was a little interest expressed, and I love writing stuff up, I'm offering a comparison/review of the G-nexus vs. Bionic. I would never look to make a troll post or start a flame war, so please don't view it as that. I just wanted to give some honest impressions/opinions... Remember, you are certainly not required to read on any further if its going to make you a sad panda. That being said, if you like the way I compare and review and have any questions or specifics you'd like me to sound off on I'd be more than happy to. For this I'm going to follow the layout of topics give in the sticky for Bionic initial impressions/reviews, but I'm doing this for comparison purposes, not review purposes, so if their really isn't much difference or comparing them is not relevant for some aspect, I won't bother.
Aesthetics: The Gnex is very pretty, but so is the Bionic. They each are beautiful, well-built phones, IMO. Nothing about the Gnex feels “cheap” to me, as people love to say about Samsung phones. Both are great. As something for you to LoL at me about, its taking me a bit to get used to having the power button on the side now and volume buttons on opposite side. I've dumbly jammed on the top of the phone trying to wake it up to no avail. Its even funnier right now since I'm trying to compare the 2 phones and make them do the same things at the same time...
Screen: Gnex screen is obviously bigger and the HD SAMOLED PLUS MEGA BOOBIES whatever is a great screen. Other people will probably rave more about how one is so much better than the other, but honestly I think they are both great screens. The Gnex seems to default to a lower brightness (set on auto) than the Bionic. I toggled them both to max brightness and just fired up the same youtube vid on both devices and held side by side, along with some games and images. Actually this was my first time doing that and right now I have to say I can see the differences and the nexus is the winner. Might be the first time I've noticed the dreaded “pentile-ness” on the Bionic's screen (Yep, I went there..). Colors and shades look nicer on the nexus and edges are definitely smoother. I'm actually pretty impressed at this very moment... but ya know, I'd still think the Bionic's screen was fantastic if I'd never held the nexus. Now it just seems, less fantastic :\
Phone: In my other post I said they were on par, but after just having a call I tested it out a little more, mostly on speakerphone, Moto wins. The Samsung is actually pretty good and clear, but compared to the Bionic I have to be honest and it doesn't sound AS clear. Call sounded just a bit staticy, not bad by any means, but certainly Moto is more clear. Whatever Moto does to their hardware in regards to phone performance, they are still king
Overall User Interface: How do you compare Gingerbread/Blur to pure ICS? Not in any fair way probably. It's just a gorgeous new OS, IMHO. I'll try and stop raving, and I'm sure everyone is going to have their own opinion anyway. I really, really do love it though. I don't think I could run a stock build of android before, I would have needed to have [INSERT NAME OF YOUR PREFERRED 3RD PARTY LAUNCHER], but I am just loving ICS in all its stock glory. I really hope Moto doesn't ruin it with blur for you guys, but I'd recommend hopping on some dev's pure builds when they are ready.
Widgets: I'm not a big widget user so won't say too much. I use Beautiful Widgets superclock for my main homescreen, and a calendar widget on another, but nothing else worth mentioning even. I'm trying out the Gmail widget and its really nice, but I never really used it on the Bionic so can't compare.
Signal quality: Pasting this from my other post-- So far signal seems a little bit better, but the difference is small. This I mean in terms of bars of service. I have not yet seen the phone drop to 3G, which is a good sign, though I've really only been in my apartment where my Bionic got fine signal too. Tomorrow I'll be at work from 6am to noon... My job site is the one place where I would consistently run into issues with the Bionic, where it would have trouble holding 4G and sometimes would drop data altogether requiring an airplane mode toggle. So I will be keeping a close eye on the nexus then and will let you know how she fares in the weaker signal area. The job site is in the north Bronx, NY and should have fine 4G coverage so I never understood why the signal would get so wonky there (it's theoretically in what should be a better coverage area than my apartment).
--- Something definitely real and very unexpected: The nexus is without a doubt seeing FASTER 4G than the bionic did, so far at least. I'm not a big fan of SpeedTest app's results because on the Bionic they always seemed to come up low even though in real use the 4G speed was always fantastic. But FWIW, the nexus is getting higher scores in that app. And in real use, files and apps are downloading much noticeably faster on the nexus... I wouldn't say it if it weren't very noticeable and def true. I'm also not saying everyone here should be sad about it, I mean the Bionic's 4G speed was always sick for me, so this is just even better.
GPS: Seems every bit as quick and accurate as it was on the Bionic. Haven't tried navigation yet, but I really don't expect any differences.
Email/Calendar: The new gmail and calendar apps are very nice upgrades, as you would expect. You probably know or could look up the changes, most of which are subtle I'd say but still really nice, so I won't bore you with them.
Battery Life: Way too early for me to say, especially since I spent all last night going through plugging and unplugging from USB and many reboots while I was unlocking, rooting, flashing clockwork recovery, backing up stuff, playing around with adb, etc etc etc. I'll have a better feel for it in a few days. Also I have the extended battery in (which, as every article points out, should have been the stock battery since it doesn't add any noticeable size difference), never even took the stock battery out of its wrapper, lol, so that's going to make a difference too (its 2100 mAh versus the stock bionic one which I think was 1750 mAh or so, right?).
Performance: Much smoother and quicker than the Bionic. The combination of pure ICS versus blur-skinned GB, plus the slightly faster processor, equals much quicker operation, no 2 ways about it. The processor alone is definitely a noticeable improvement on its own. When I operate it clockwork recovery to make backups and stuff its a lot faster than it was on the Bionic – I'm using that as an example since its a situation where the OS is not even loaded yet.
Media (music, movies, DLNA): Since I already commented on screen differences I don't have to again. Don't know what else is going to make a difference really. Yeah the bigger size of the screen makes watching videos even better, but that's just a given. Music performance through stock player seems very similar, although a tad crisper on the nexus. When I flipped on the nexus' equalizer the sound quality was even better. Though I never had any complaints about listening to music on my Bionic.
Keyboard's: I use swiftkey x so can't compare much, though it seems to be performing a little better on this device (bit more accurate and responsive). Until I set it up I used the stock keyboard for a couple hours and it worked fine, as it also did on the Bionic, IMO.
Camera (both still & video): Well... Every single review you read of the nexus starts with saying something about how you don't really appreciate the Zero-shutter lag until you use it... and yep its true. The split second you touch the shutter button, the picture is done, unless you are in low light and it needs to use the flash, in which case it takes about a tenth of a second longer, lol. And for all that quickness, pictures come out well-focused. Here's 2 comparison shots, 1st link is taken with the bionic (
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/47300967/bionic.jpg), 2nd with the nex (
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/47300967/nexus.jpg). I'm sorry for that ugly dog, she's my roommate's
Even though the pics were taken at 8mp on bionic and 5mp on the nexus, I think its tough to see a difference. The built in options and editing features on the Nexus' camera and gallery apps are sick as well, but you can read many reviews and descriptions about them. Nexus just wins this category hands down.
Disappointments (Let's call this, Things I Miss About The Bionic): For one, the Contacts app (now called People) I think I preferred more before, although I'm still just adjusting to some of the differences.
Second, No facebook contact sync! Yep its true, you can google it to find out why, but in pure google OS' contact sync with facebook is currently not enabled and I miss it. However, the next update (4.0.3) is supposedly going to allow them to fix that, I'm guessing because so many people who just bought the nexus without reading up about that first have been screaming at Google and VZ about it, lol. I'm well aware that I can also use syncmypix to get the images I'm used to, as well as friendster or friendcaster or whatever... just haven't gotten around to it yet, but not having it natively available, at least not yet, is disappointing.
No HDMI out... Meh, tbh it was more of a novelty for me, something to show off to people that I never really used. I miss knowing it was there though, lol. Certainly if its something you use with any regularity you'll want to steer clear of this phone.
That's about it.. I mean here and there I keep finding out I can't do something like I was used to, then I realize I just do it a little differently on this phone and its all good. Probably after some more time I'll have a better idea of what, if anything, I felt the Bionic did better, for now everything is overall very sweet, I'm very happy with this phone, and now I'm off to play with it some more.
Hope I was able to provide some info, if anyone wants me to weigh in on something else, or to go into more detail on any topic I already covered, just ask!
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