iPhone 5 vs Samsung Galaxy Note 2

We take a look at the forthcoming Galaxy Note 2 ‘phablet’ to see how it compares with Apple’s iPhone 5. Form iPhone 5 - 123.8x58.6x7.6mm, 112g Samsung Galaxy Note 2 - 151.1x80.5x9.4mm, 180g The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 follows the company’s Galaxy S3 flagship and the larger Note 10.1 tablet with Samsung’s carefully tailored new style. The aesthetic includes a metallic surround on the outer edge, a smooth back panel and neatly contoured corners. Overall however, it is very similar to its predecessor, the original Galaxy Note, though it is a bit bigger and slightly curvier. The bezel around the screen is thinner than before and the solid home button is more rounded. Despite the use of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean the handset still sports capacitive controls on either side of the home button. The Note 2 is pleasing to the eye, but less so to the hand as, like Samsung’s other recent devices the plastic used has a tacky feeling to it. Being bigger than the original Galaxy Note, the Note 2 is also going to be more difficult to handle, especially for users with smaller hands. There is also the issue of holding such a large phone to your ear and whether or not this makes you feel daft. If not, more power to you, but otherwise there’s always hands-free kits. The iPhone 5 is similarly not that much of a re-invention from Apple’s existing catalogue. It’s a bit bigger lengthways to make room for the enlarged 4-inch display and instead of a glass back panel with an aluminium surround you’ve got a complete aluminium unibody. The charging port is now smaller to work with Apple’s newly designed ‘Lightning’ charging and data cable and the 3.5mm audio jack has been moved from the top panel to the bottom. It’s worth pointing out that Apple is releasing an adaptor for the Lightning cable which will convert it to Micro USB, although according to reports it will only work as a charger in this mode rather than for transferring data. In terms of build quality Apple has delivered its usual high standard. The Galaxy Note 2 is not a flimsy device at all but it doesn’t have the same reassuring feel, although it is more visually interesting. This one’s a draw. Winner - Draw Storage Both handsets have a full set of three options for internal storage: 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. While the iPhone 5 sticks to Apple’s habit of not including Micro SD card support, the Galaxy Note 2 does have a card slot and supports both Micro SD and Micro SDHC, up to 32GB and 64GB respectively. The Galaxy Note 2 takes the win here easily. Winner – Samsung Galaxy Note 2 Display Samsung’s Galaxy Note 2 is larger than its predecessor with a 5.55-inch Super AMOLED display at 1280x720 pixels, which gives a pixel density of 267 pixels-per-inch (ppi). While it’s not quite up there with Apple’s Retina display in terms of pixel density it’s still extremely high for a touchscreen of this size and delivers fantastic visual quality. The picture is sharp and colours are vivid. It’s also reinforced with Gorilla Glass 2. Apple has expanded the iPhone’s display from 3.5-inches to an even 4-inches. The scale is certainly nicer to look at for things like web browsing and films, though not as satisfyingly vast as the Note 2’s swathe of glass. But, on the plus side it hasn’t lost any of its ease-of-use and thumbing your way round the screen with one hand is still a breeze. In terms of picture quality, Apple has avoided rocking the boat by delivering a similarly high pixel density to the previous, smaller-screened iPhone models. It’s still an IPS LCD Retina display and has a higher resolution than its predecessors at 1136x640 pixels, giving a pixel density of 326ppi (slightly lower than the previous 330ppi). Both displays have 16:9 widescreen aspect ratios in landscape orientation. The question here is whether you want to trade-off some visual clarity for a larger screen and that’s a very personal choice. Both are delivering premium-level display quality so we’re calling it a draw. Winner – Draw Processor The Galaxy Note 2 uses Samsung’s Exynos 4412 quad core chip clocked at 1.6GHz and based on ARM’s Cortex-A9 architecture. This runs with 32 nanometre (nm) semiconductor technology, 2GB of dual-channel RAM and a Mali-400MP graphics processing unit. To say performance is fast would be an understatement and this setup offers better power efficiency than Nvidia’s competing Tegra 3 quad. The jury is still out on the specifics of Apple’s new A6 chip found inside the iPhone 5. What Apple has said is that it’s twice as fast as the previous A5X chip, which was Cortex-A9 based with 45nm tech and 1GB of dual-channel RAM. Apple also says the GPU is twice as fast as the earlier quad core PowerVR SGX543MP4 found on the A5X. The new chip appears to still be a dual core clocked at around 1GHz, but current speculation says the A6 could be based on next-gen Cortex-A15 architecture, with 32nm tech. An opposing theory says it could be using an overclocked Cortex-A9 setup on 32nm tech instead. Obviously this is going to be pretty quick either way, but if it is A15 based then it’s true next-gen tech and will be much faster than anything else on the market both now and going forward. Winner – iPhone 5 Operating System Samsung’s Galaxy Note 2 runs the latest version of Android, version 4.1 Jelly Bean, with the company’s TouchWiz interface on top and a number of tweaks specially designed for the included S-Pen stylus. Overall performance seems to have benefited from Google’s Butter UI tweaks and everything operates very smoothly indeed, Samsung has taken advantage of this improved capability to add some more processor intensive visual tweaks to the interface, so now there are a number of flashy carousel modes for you to view your pictures and video, and video thumbnails will actually play in preview mode. Jelly Bean should also offer more reliability than previous builds and the use of ‘swipe-to-close’ UI features is now more prevalent throughout the interface. It includes Google’s new ‘Google Now’ service, which is an interesting and useful medley of location-based services, notifications, reminders and an improved Google Voice. The whole package has been oddly described as like having a personal assistant who’s also a stalker, for example, it’ll send you useful stuff sometimes before you’ve even arrived at a particular location. The Google Voice component is also much more rewarding to use than Apple’s Siri. An interesting new feature, added by Samsung, is the ability to use written S-Pen input for searches. You can, for example, write search terms for a location and the weather and it’ll conduct a Google search before presenting you with the results. Apple’s new iOS 6 is a much less impressive update. There are a few additions but it’s not a landmark change as some previous builds have been and as Jelly Bean for Android certainly is. Apple is introducing its new navigation suite, which no longer relies on Google and uses its own 3D mapping technology. This provides voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation and cinematic ‘Flyover’ modes, as well as over 100 million points of interest (POIs). Siri has been tweaked and can now understand more phrases and questions. Now when searching for a place to eat it’ll be better able to factor in the cuisine, the number of people and the time of day. Apple has specifically given it a crash course in film trivia so it’ll be better able to answer your cinema-based queries. Photostreaming is now more, well, streamlined, and Twitter integration has been deepened, it’s also now joined by Facebook integration and you can update your statuses with notifications directly from the notifications screen, or you can use Siri to dictate one. Overall we think iOS 6 is quite a lacklustre version of the platform, where Jelly Bean is a strong and vibrant contribution from Google. Winner - Samsung Galaxy Note 2 Final Thoughts In our view the Galaxy Note 2 is the winning model here. The iPhone5 is yet again another incremental update and displays a lack of imagination on Apple’s part, primarily on the operating system front which is really Apple's bread and butter. Meanwhile, Samsung has clearly been listening to fans of the Galaxy Note to establish what they loved and what they thought needed changing. While it remains to be seen whether or not the Galaxy Note 2’s improved hardware can cope with some of Samsung’s more ambitious software changes, or if it’ll go the way of the Note 10.1 tablet and hamstring itself, it’s still a more interesting handset. sex gadget,sex toy,adult toy