12 Reasons Why Apple iPhone 4S Will Lose to Motorola Droid Bionic

There were rumors that Apple Inc. has sold 4 million units of iPhone 4S during the weekend but officially it is known that pre-orders reached the 1 million mark.

Meanwhile, Apple is set to release its fourth quarter earnings Tuesday after the market closes. Analysts are expecting Apple to issue the details of iPhone 4S unit sales for the opening weekend at the fourth quarter earnings conference call.

The strongest iPhone 4S rival, Motorola Droid Bionic, came to the United States after several changes in terms of design. The Apple smartphone is going to face stiff competition from Motorola Droid Bionic.

At the beginning of this year, it looked like the Motorola Atrix but when Droid Bionic was nearing release it was very similar to the Motorola Droid 3, one of the latest high-end phones. However, the Motorola Droid 3 has a slider QWERTY, unlike the Droid Bionic that is just a touchscreen phone.

Other changes for the Droid Bionic includes higher RAM capacity, change in chipset from the Tegra 2 AP20H to the Texas Instruments' OMAP4430 and surprisingly the inclusion of lesser battery capacity compared to the one introduced in the beginning.

Droid Bionic, which runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS, comes with a 4.3-inch HD screen featuring the Corning Gorilla scratch-free glass, a front-facing camera for video chat, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, Adobe Flash preloaded, 32 GB of memory and a slim frame. It has a dual-core 1 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM.

On the other hand, as expected iPhone 4S featured some important upgrades that were rumored to be a part of the imaginary iPhone 5, like the 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU, an Apple A5 chipset and a 8-megapixel LED flash camera with 1080p HD video recording. It also has a 3.5-inch TFT Retina multi-touch display and is loaded with the latest Apple operating system iOS 5.

iPhone 4S also comes with alternating antennae for better call reception, CDMA and GSM support, a personal assistant called Siri, iCloud and Bluetooth 4.0 wireless technology. However, missing were prominent specs like edge-to-edge design, a larger display, 4G LTE and Near Field Communication (NFC) technology.

Here is a look at the 12 reasons why Droid Bionic will beat iPhone 4S.

Processing Power: The Droid Bionic offers the Texas Instruments' OMAP4430 chipset, clocking in at 1 GHz, which uses dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 with a PowerVR SGX540 integrated 3D graphics accelerator that runs at a clock frequency of 304 MHz.

And the Motorola smartphone comes with ARM-Cortex A9s with ARMs SIMD engine (Media Processing Engine, aka NEON) which may have a significant performance advantage in some cases over Nvidia Tegra 2's Cortex-A9s with non-vector floating point units. And there is a dual-channel LPDDR2 memory controller compared to Nvidia Tegra 2's single-channel memory controller.

Meanwhile, iPhone 4S comes with iPad 2's A5 chipset. The phone will be powered by 1 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU with NEON SIMD accelerator and a dual core PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU.

Apple lists the A5 to be clocked at 1 GHz on iPad 2's technical specifications page, though it can dynamically adjust its frequency to save battery life.

The Apple A5 is a package on package system-on-a-chip designed by Apple and manufactured by Samsung to replace the Apple A4. Apple stated that the CPU is twice as powerful and the GPU up to seven times as powerful as its predecessor, the Apple A4. The A5 package contains 512 MB of low-power DDR2 RAM clocked at 533 MHz.

According to Engadget, Texas Instruments' OMAP 4430, NVIDIA's Tegra 2 and Samsung's Exynos 4210 went head to head in a gauntlet of browser and graphical benchmarks, and it looks like the LG Optimus 3D's OMAP 4 came out on top, boasting of minor but significant improvements practically across the board.

Given that many other SoC vendors are shipping dual-core Cortex A9 SoCs, the A5 was likely no different from NVIDIA's Tegra 2, TI's OMAP 4 or Samsung's Exynos in that regard: armed with a pair of Cortex A9s running at 1GHz.

Operating System: Apple's iPhone 4S comes equipped with the recently announced iOS 5. The important features of iOS 5 are already found in Android, except iMessage that is copied from RIM's BlackBerry. The iOS 5 important features include the notification bar, cloud synchronization, wireless syncing, Twitter integration and Widgets.

The Droid Bionic comes equipped with Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS. In recent days, Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS is used in smartphones and Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS is used in tablets.

But the next version of Android called the Ice Cream Sandwich will be a single OS running across smartphones and tablets. Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt confirmed in an interview with Marc Banioff at Salesforce.com’s conference, Dreamforce, in San Francisco, about the rumours of Ice Cream Sandwich, which was previewed at a Google conference in May.

Recently, Larry Page said in his Google+ page that Ice Cream Sandwich will be launched in Hong Kong on Oct. 19. It is expected that Google and Samsung will unveil Ice Cream Sandwich on Samsung Nexus Prime smartphone.

Open Source Advantage: The entire Google Inc.'s Android OS is an open source system, which has inspired increased transparency and liberty. Being made publicly available enables anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees.

Anyone can get access to the source of Android to better the system. This is also a double-edged sword, in the sense that it allows those will less-than-ideal intentions to discover any weakness of the phone. But that can be seen as an indirect plus because when weaknesses are found in the open source community, they are quickly fixed. The same thing cannot be expected of the iPhone 4S.

Display Size: Motorola Droid Bionic uses a qHD (960 x 540 pixels, 256 ppi pixel density) TFT display for its 4.3-inch screen. qHD is a display resolution of 960×540 pixels which is exactly one quarter of a full HD 1080p and three quarters of a 720p frame, in a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Droid Bionic’s screen fits the same 16:9 ratio as your HD TV which, in conjunction with that extra inch or so, makes film and TV viewing a far more natural fit. Full HD resolution (1920 x 1080) looks good on 40-inch LCD TV, but here we are talking about a quarter of the full HD resolution (i.e. 960 x 540) which perfectly fits the 4.3-inch screen and is more than enough to get that HD effect.

On the other hand, iPhone 4S has the same 3.5-inch TFT Retina multi-touch display that may give a resolution of 960 x 640 pixels at 326 ppi density.

If Retina display is taken into consideration, it is an LCD display that boasts of a super high pixel density by squeezing a 960 x 640 pixel resolution into 3.5 inches of iPhone 4S, a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch (ppi). Apple claimed that it's this resolution, 326 pixels per inch, which is the same as that of the human eye.

According to Apple, the resolution was achieved on a relatively small screen thanks to pixels that are just 78 micrometers wide. However, Raymond Soneria, the president of DisplayMate Technologies, previously stated that the resolution of the human retina is higher than that claimed by Apple, working out to 477 ppi at 12 inches (305 mm) from the eyes.

If we are talking about pure size and shape, the Motorola Droid Bionic easily wins provided one values clarity over compactness. At 4.3 inches, the Droid Bionic’s display dwarfs iPhone 4S. The iPhone has the superior all-round picture with its sharpness and clarity at all angles due to its smaller display size. However, the Droid Bionic wins out for sheer size. Besides it has a movie-friendly 16:9 aspect ratio.

Design: Apple's iPhone 4S is just an upgrade of its previous versions. On the other hand, the delay of Droid Bionic showed that Motorola prepped various designs with improved modifications and specs. Droid Bionic has undergone several changes in terms of design.

It looked like the Motorola Atrix at the beginning of this year, but now looks very similar to the Motorola Droid 3, one of the latest high-end phones launched by Motorola. But the Motorola Droid 3 has a slider QWERTY, unlike the Droid Bionic that is just a touchscreen phone with a 4.3-inch screen.

WebTop Application: The revolutionary webtop application from Motorola extends the Droid Bionic into something far beyond the average smartphone. Just connect Droid Bionic to unique HD Multi-Media dock accessory and webtop does the rest.

Via an HDMI connection to HDTV or PC monitor, the user can launch a full Firefox 4.0 browser that gives access to the phone’s interface as well as 200,000 Android Marketplace apps. The user can surf the Web, make calls, send texts, or run GoogleDocs and other Web apps. To make sure this data remains alone for a user, several business-grade security measures such as data encryption and remote device management are implemented for maximum security.

Flash: Flash is considered as a big advantage an Android systems holds against iPhone. Flash enriches Web experience. Any Flash player has to be able to animate on top of video renderings, which makes hardware accelerated video rendering at least not as straightforward as with a purpose-built multimedia player.

Therefore, even when only displaying video, Flash players are more resource-intensive than a dedicated video player software. Presently for Apple, only Mac OS 9/X supports Flash.

Droid Bionic supports Flash. Rather than using Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Recently, Adobe said Flash will come to Apple Inc.'s iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, not directly supported but just that the new app tools will be able to export Flash content as an HTML5-supporting format.

RAM and Memory: Droid Bionic has the privilege of expandable memory and a removable battery. Apple's iPhone versions differ from other smartphones in the market in terms of removable storage as none of them have featured one.

Quite a few smartphones have slots that support a range of memory cards which allow you to keep one card in the device for a permanent storage solution, and still have a slot available for cards from your camera or other devices. With the falling price of memory cards, you could have several cards with music and videos tucked away in the carrying case.

Over the years, the iPhone has offered impressive internal storage (from 8GB to 32GB) and now iPhone 4S also has internal storage of 64GB. However, some iPhone users are unhappy with the lack of a memory card slot, which can expand the handset’s storage capabilities and provide a quick and easy way to back up data. As iPhones usually don’t feature card slots, the Droid Bionic holds an edge over iPhone 4S.

In terms of RAM memory, Apple never reveals its capacity and it always turns out to be less than other phones. It was recently known that iPhone 4S has 512 MB of RAM memory. A teardown done by iFixit showed that the new iPhone, surprisingly, includes 512 on-board RAM instead of most-expected 1 GB RAM.

The Droid Bionic has received an upgraded RAM memory of 1GB of DDR2 from 512 MB RAM featured during the beginning of this year. The Droid Bionic also has 2 GB ROM support along with 1 GHz of dual core processor. And with 4G LTE, surely the Droid Bionic can live up to the claim made by the Verizon ad, which describes it as “ferocious force and an all-powerful, unstoppable device. Control it and you can control everything.”

Battery: The Apple smartphone has a Li-Po 1420 mAh battery, with 8 hours of talk time on 3G networks and up to 14 hours on 2G networks (GSM). According to iFixit, the battery inside the iPhone 4S is rated at 5.3 Watt-hour capacity that is slightly more than the 5.25 Watt-hour of the battery used in both iPhone 4.

To support the high-end Motorola Droid Bionic there is a whopping 1735 mAh battery which should give enough power to keep the phone running for a longer period.

High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI): HDMI support is available in the Motorola Droid Bionic which is not found in the iPhone 4S. How do you hook it up to your HD monitor? The short answer is that you don't. The maximum audience for an iPhone screening is one or two. You want more? Use your laptop and hook that up, or your desktop machine. Apple offers an expensive HDMI adapter to please a few geeks.

HDMI connects digital audio/video sources (such as set-top boxes, DVD players, HD DVD players, Blu-ray Disc players, AVCHD camcorders, personal computers (PCs) and video game consoles such as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and AV receivers) to compatible digital audio devices, computer monitors, video projectors, tablet computers and digital televisions.

4G LTE: Droid Bionic already has 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, but iPhone 4S doesn't deliver 4G speeds over LTE or Mobile WiMAX networks. The Apple smartphone has HSDPA 14.4 Mbps, HSUPA 5.8 Mbps support and CDMA EV-DO Rev. A (800, 1900 MHz) technology.

According to a research note from Hudson Square analyst Todd Rethemeir, the new iPhone due this fall will support HSPA+ technology, a development that will allow the device to offer faster data speeds on GSM networks such as AT&T.

The present iPhones are shipped with standard HSPA. Even though HSPA+ is slower than the LTE standard, AT&T has begun marketing its HSPA+ network as 4G, meaning that the carrier positions iPhone 4S as a 4G device despite it failing to offer LTE compatibility.

The phone does support AT&T’s 14.4Mbps HSPA+ network, which AT&T markets as 4G, whereas its predecessor supported AT&T’s 7.2Mbps 3G HSPA network.

Apps and open source: The Android market has improved in quality and quantity over the past few years and is expected to surpass the App store. The biggest plus point about Android apps is that majority of the quality apps are free.

Android Market is an online software store developed by Google for Android OS devices. Anyone can get access to the source of Android to better the system. If any weaknesses are found in the open source community, they are quickly fixed.

Though Apple's iOS is not an open source, 200 million users have downloaded over 15 billion apps from Apple's App Store. As of May 2011, Apple approved its 500,000th app.