Motorola Droid Razr M vs Samsung Galaxy S3
There are numerous ways for a manufacturing company to release their products. In fact, all these release styles needs to be adopted at a time for a different usage. For instance, when you’re releasing a flagship product, you organize a glamorous event just to do that. This will improve the visual appearance and prestige of owning that product. For the same reason, sometimes manufacturers released their products in a collective conference or a similar event where a lot of other products are released from different companies. The logic behind this is to let the tech geeks who comes to these events check their products and give publicity on behalf of the company. It’s a beautiful concept and relatively economical for the company, as well. The internet has been a great platform to host the publicity given by these tech-geeks and essentially, we at DifferenceBetween are also part of that community.
So when Motorola released Droid Razr M at a separate event which was held in New York, we were caught by surprise. Since they are keeping their grounds and hosting a glamorous event, we can only assume the handset to be a prestigious flagship product. It is no secret that Motorola treats their smartphones fair and reinforces them to resist rugged condition. This handset is not so different. It comes as the successor for Droid Razr and has striking similarities to the predecessor. Let us take this smartphone for a ride and compare it with one of the best smartphones out there in the world; Samsung Galaxy S3 III.
Motorola Droid Razr M Review
Motorola is recognized as one of the best smartphone manufactures in the world and is better known for the thinnest smartphone line they have. Today we are going to talk about a smartphone they released in an event, in New York on 5 Sep 2012. Motorola Droid Razr M inherits much from its predecessor and has a striking resemblance to Droid Razr. It has the same 4.3 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 960 x 540 pixels at a pixel density of 256ppi. Even though, it has quite a large screen, it doesn’t feel big in your hand scoring dimensions of 122.5 x 60.9mm and a thickness of 8.3mm. At a weight of 126g, it feels rather soft in your hand. Motorola seems to have given much thought in engineering this handset because it has plenty of designer options. For instance, they have managed to shrink the body compared to the predecessor and included stylish rivets around the rim of the device.
Inside this attractive shell is a processor waiting to burst. It is powered by 1.5GHz dual core processor on top of Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chipset with 1GB of RAM. While this might not be the best configuration you can find in the market, it differs from the usual pack due to the Snapdragon S4 chipset which was released only recently. Android OS v4.0.4 ICS has assumed duties as the operating system, and the UI is more of a mixture of Vanilla Android and Motorola’s overlay. It was pretty snappy on our hands and impressed us enough on usability. Motorola starts the internal storage of the device at 8GB and gives you the option to expand using microSD cards up to 32GB. It has a 8MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos at 30 frames per second along with a VGA camera in the front for video conferencing. The camera seemed somewhat slow although this may be due to firmware issues. Motorola Razr M has two versions featuring GSM connectivity and CDMA connectivity. Same follows in the 3G connectivity by following HSDPA and CDMA2000 1xEV-DO. It is usual for us to look for a 4G LTE enabled phone nowadays and that’s what you’d get with Droid Razr M. The Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n ensures continuous connectivity with the ability to host a Wi-Fi hotspot to share your high speed internet connection. Droid Razr M stands for imminent release, and fair enough, you can pre-order it starting from today (5 Sep 2012), to start receiving it from 13th September. It’s priced at $99 for Verizon customers.
Samsung Galaxy S3 (Galaxy S III) Review
Galaxy S3, the 2012 flagship device of Samsung, 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 S3 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 and tops 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 S3 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 S3 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. S3 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 2, 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.
Samsung is boasting a direct competitor of iOS Siri, the popular Personal Assistant that accepts voice commands named S Voice. 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. S3 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 S3 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 S3 only supports the use of micro SIM cards.
A Brief Comparison Between Motorola Droid Razr M and Samsung Galaxy S3 (Galaxy S III)
• Samsung Galaxy S3 is powered by 1.5GHz Cortex A9 Quad Core processor on top of Samsung Exynos 4412 Quad chipset with Mali 400MP GPU and 1GB of RAM while Motorola Droid Razr M is powered by 1.5GHz Dual Core processor on top of Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chipset with 1GB of RAM.
• Samsung Galaxy S3 runs on Android OS v4.0.4 ICS while Motorola Droid Razr M also runs on the same operating system.
• Samsung Galaxy S3 has 4.8 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels at a pixel density of 306ppi while Motorola Droid Razr M has 4.3 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display featuring a resolution of 960 x 540 pixels at a pixel density of 256ppi.
• Samsung Galaxy S3 has 8MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30fps while Motorola Droid Razr M also has 8MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30fps.
• Samsung Galaxy S3 is bigger, thicker and heftier (136.6 x 70.6mm / 8.6mm / 133g) compared to Motorola Droid Razr M (122.5 x 60.9mm / 8.3mm / 126g).
• Samsung Galaxy S3 has 2100mAh battery while Motorola Droid Razr M has 2000mAh battery.
Conclusion
Samsung Galaxy S3 being a better smartphone is a no-brainer with the high end quad core processor it features. Hence our aim here is to evaluate whether buying a Motorola Droid Razr M and saving $100 is worth sacrificing the features Galaxy S3 would offer you. First off, Galaxy S3 would offer you a better processor, a better display and screen resolution along with the prestige of been the top selling device in Verizon and AT&T. Besides them, S3 also offers some cool features as you may have read in our description. Motorola Droid Razr M, on the other hand, offers you a smartphone with which you can work moderately and impress your friends by the stylish looks of it. Hence it’s up to you to evaluate this unique position and take your pick so as to which should take place in your pocket.