Difference Between

Samsung Galaxy S3 vs HTC One X | Speed, Performance and Features Reviewed | Full Specs Compared
 

Over the last decade, we have seen a rapid growth in technology related to everything that is mobile. At the start of it, we used to have single core processors that were used in PCs. They ran on the band of 1.0-2.4GHz and had a RAM around 256-512MB. At that time, the mobile phones had only insignificant processors. Everything started to grow rapidly, and within no time, we’ve reached processors of dual core, core 2 duo and quad core caliber. The memory also grew, although, there were complications in the clock rates. At the end of the last decade, we were able to see mobile processors that had two cores. That was quite a catch up with the PC and Laptop performance, and at the start of this year, we were fortunate enough to witness quad core processors been introduced to the mobile phones.

Looking back, we can clearly see that the gap between PC/Laptop processors and mobile processors has grown to be thin. It won’t take much time for them to merge. With the introduction of more and more quad core smartphones, the prices are coming down too. Today, we’ll talk about the newest addition to quad core family. This addition is from the leading brand in smartphone; Samsung. They have introduced Galaxy S III in to their esteemed Galaxy family and with what we have seen; it sure does seem to be a game changer. Once we put that in our slate, it’s only fair that we pick an equivalent. HTC has long been a rival of Samsung and a strong competitor. They were also among the first to introduce a quad core processor to smartphones. Thus, we’ll talk about HTC One X along with Samsung Galaxy S III and compare the differences they have.

Samsung (Galaxy S3) Galaxy S III

After a long wait, initial impressions of Galaxy S III haven’t disappointed us at all. The much anticipated smartphone comes in two color combinations, Pebble Blue and Marble White. The cover is made with a glossy plastic that Samsung called as Hyperglaze, and I have to tell you, it feels so good in your hands. It retains a striking similarity to Galaxy Nexus rather than Galaxy S II having curvier edges and no hump at the back. It is 136.6 x 70.6mm in dimensions and has a thickness of 8.6mm with a weight of 133g. As you can see, Samsung has managed to produce this monster of a smartphone with a very reasonable size and weight. It comes with a 4.8 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen that features a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels at a pixel density of 306ppi. There’s apparently, no surprise here, but Samsung has incorporated PenTile matrix instead of using RGB matrix for their touchscreen. The image reproduction quality of the screen is beyond expectation, and the reflex of the screen is also rather low.

The power of any smartphone lies in its processor and Samsung Galaxy S III comes with a 32nm 1.4GHz Quad Core Cortex A9 processor on top of Samsung Exynos chipset as predicted. It also accompanies this with 1GB of RAM and Android OS v4.0.4 IceCreamSandwich. Needless to say, this is a very solid combination of specs. The initial benchmarks of this device suggest that it’s going to top the market in every aspect possible. A significant performance boost in the Graphics Processing Unit is also ensured by the Mali 400MP GPU. It comes with 16 / 32 and 64GB storage variations with the option of using a microSD card to expand the storage up to 64GB. This versatility has landed Samsung Galaxy S III with a huge advantage because that was one of the prominent disadvantages in Galaxy Nexus. As predicted, the network connectivity is reinforced with 4G LTE connectivity that varies regionally. Galaxy S III also has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity and the built in DLNA ensure that you can share your multimedia contents in your big screen easily. S III can also act as a Wi-Fi hotspot enabling you to share the monster 4G connection with your less fortunate friends. The camera seems to be the same available in Galaxy S II, which is 8MP camera with autofocus and LED flash. Samsung has incorporated simultaneous HD video and image recording to this beast along with geo tagging, touch focus, face detection and image & video stabilization. The video recording is at 1080p @ 30 frames per second while having the ability to video conference using the front facing camera of 1.9MP. Besides these conventional features, there are a whole lot of usability features that we can eagerly await.

Samsung is boasting a direct competitor of iOS Siri, the popular Personal Assistant that accepts voice commands named S Voice. The model exhibited didn’t have a sound model of this new addition, but Samsung guaranteed that it would be there when the smartphone is released. The strength of S Voice is the ability to recognize languages other than English, like Italian, German, French and Korean. There are a lot of gestures that can land you in different applications, as well. For instance, if you tap and hold the screen while you rotate the phone, you can go directly in to the camera mode. S III will also call whoever the contact you were browsing when you raise the handset to your ear, which is a good usability aspect. Samsung Smart Stay is designed to identify whether you’re using the phone and switch the screen off if you’re not. It uses the front camera with facial detection in order to achieve this task. Similarly, Smart Alert feature will make your smartphone vibrate when you pick it up if you have any missed calls of other notifications. Finally, Pop Up Play is a feature that would best explain the performance boost S III has. Now you can work with any application you like and have a video playing on top of that application on its own window. The window size can be adjusted while the feature worked flawlessly with the tests we ran.

A smartphone of this caliber needs a lot of juice, and that is provided by the 2100mAh batter resting at the back of this handset. It also has a barometer and a TV out while you have to be careful about the SIM because S III only supports the use of micro SIM cards.

HTC One X

HTC One X is indeed the ace of the lot. It is filled with power that is waiting to burst out just like a beast. It follows the unique and ergonomically sound design pattern of HTC with curved edges and three touch buttons at the bottom. It comes in either Black cover or White cover although I rather prefer the purity of the White cover. It has 4.7 inches Super IPS LCD 2 Capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels at a pixel density of 312ppi. It is rather thinner although not the thinnest in the market scoring a thickness of 9.3mm and it has a weight of 130g which is equally ideal for a short duration or a long duration.

These may sound like pretty trivial features for an Android smartphone, but this beast comes with a 1.5GHz Quad Core processor on top of Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset and 1GB RAM with ULP GeForce GPU. We are positive that the benchmarks will skyrocket with HTC One X. The beast is tamed by Android OS v4.0 IceCreamSandwich which we believe is suitable for handling multi core processors effectively, thus enabling HTC One X to attain its full thrust. HTC One X is somewhat short with the memory with 32GB internal storage without an option to expand, yet it’s still a lot of memory for a phone. The UI is certainly not the Vanilla Android; rather it’s a variant of HTC Sense UI. In the perspective of usability, we see the normal unique advantages of IceCreamSandwich being featured here, as well.

HTC has given some thought to this handset because it also has 8MP camera with autofocus and LED flash that can capture 1080p HD videos at 30 frames per second including stereo sound and video stabilization. The interesting feature is that HTC claims you can capture a snapshot even while you’re capturing 1080p HD video which is simply awesome. It also comes with 1.3MP front camera bundled together with Bluetooth v3.0 for the purpose of video conferencing. It features HSDPA connectivity up to 21Mbps, which is great. The Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n enables continuous connectivity and Wi-Fi sharing through the ability to host a Wi-Fi hotspot. It also has built-in DLNA, which enables you to stream rich media content to your SmartTV. We assume the HTC’s claim of having processing power to support a streaming video on the SmartTV while you’re on a call is not an exaggeration.

Apart from these facts, we know that HTC One X comes with 1800mAh battery; we can assume it to stand somewhere around 6-7 hours.

Conclusion

Usually, there is a factor in two smartphones, which makes them different from one another. In this case, that is the connectivity. As it can be seen, Samsung Galaxy S3 comes with 4G LTE connectivity while HTC One X has to suffice with HSDPA connectivity. If the bandwidth is important for you, you may keep an eye on Samsung Galaxy S3 over HTC One X. Otherwise, we can consider both smartphones to render the same caliber of performance. The slight difference in the clock rate isn’t about to give an advantage to HTC One X. Both display panels are sharp and crispy. The optics is also of the same caliber. If you’re eager to watch a lot of movies on the run with your smartphone, you may have to rethink your decision because HTC One X has a restriction on internal memory with no option to expand. That been said, both of these smartphones are spectacular in the perspective of usability although Galaxy S3 has a slight edge over HTC One X on this one too. We at DB hope this breakdown of facts would be helpful for you to make your decision.