Difference Between Samsung Galaxy S3 and ZTE Era

Samsung Galaxy S3 vs ZTE Era | Full Specs Compared
 

ZTE is a company that recently approached the smartphone market, but they are doing well according to the market trends. They have released a smartphone that has a quad core processor and has scored a plus among a lot of other rivals. With the release of Samsung Galaxy S III, ZTE Era will have a new rival in the market. We’ll discuss the individual characteristics of these smartphones before moving on to identify differences between them. Thus, we can conclude whether ZTE has anticipated this rivalry and took corrective actions to nullify the effect on ZTE Era or not.

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.

ZTE Era

ZTE Era is basically a flagship product of ZTE that is meant to take ZTE to higher levels in the market. The executive vice president of ZTE clearly mentioned that they intend to move from low-middle end of the market to middle-high end of the market with the introduction of devices like Era. He further stated that the handset would mark a new era for the company and hence the name. It seems to have curved edges and a four touch button setup at the bottom. It has 4.3 inches TFT Capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 960 x 540 pixels at a pixel density of 256ppi. Era comes with 1.3GHz quad core processor on top of Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset and ULP GeForce GPU with 1GB of RAM. Android OS v4.0 ICS will be the governing body for this little beast of a phone. It is needless to say that we are impressed with the raw hardware specs, but we actually need to perform benchmarking tests in order to compare the performances of these devices objectively.

The new handheld device from ZTE has 8GB of internal storage with the ability to expand it using microSD card up to 32GB. It keeps itself connected using the HSDPA connectivity and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n improvises whenever there is a wireless hotspot available. Since the handset supports speeds up to 21Mbps, you can be generous by sharing your internet connection hosting a Wi-Fi hotspot. ZTE hasn’t forgotten to include an acceptable camera in this device, as well. The 8MP camera is pretty decent with autofocus and LED flash, and it can record 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second. The camera also has Geo tagging and the front camera bundled together with Bluetooth v3.0 makes it ideal for video conferencing. As mentioned earlier, ZTE has included a new User Interface they have been working on, which is codenamed as Mifavor. It is said to deliver intuitive operation, personalized customization and an exciting new user experience as its fundamental characteristics. ZTE claims that they have completely reengineered the Vanilla Android user interfaces and that Mifavor has nine home screens by default. We will do a separate piece on Mifavor later when we have more information and hands on Mifavor.

Conclusion

If ZTE anticipated the entrance of Galaxy S III to the market and took corrective measures to counterbalance the stability, we would be able to see the imprints of that from ZTE Era. Unfortunately, those imprints seem to be pretty weary. You can consider the performance matrix to fall in the same range, but ZTE Era falls behind with the display panel in terms of resolution and image reproduction. Further, the connectivity of Era is limited to HSDPA while Galaxy S III has 4G LTE connectivity, and it also features better optics. Even though this is the case, ZTE Era is considerably thinner than Galaxy S III and certainly has a stunning look. We won’t proceed as much as to blame ZTE for not anticipating these for better companies have made the same mistake. Instead, we commend ZTE for the design of the Era which will give a close fight to Samsung Galaxy S III.