Samsung Galaxy S2 Will Face Competition From Droid Bionic

Apart from Apple Inc.'s iPhone 5, the most awaited Android smartphones are Samsung Galaxy S2 and Motorola Droid Bionic.

The much-awaited Samsung Galaxy S2, which sold about 3 million units worldwide, may hit the U.S. smartphone market on July 21. According to a listing that appeared briefly on Best Buy Canada, Canadian mobile provider Bell is set to launch the anticipated Samsung smartphone on July 21, Endgadget reported.

The page has since been pulled off, but when it was live, it showed that the Samsung Galaxy S2 had been priced at $150 with a three-year commitment, which later increased to $170. If this is true, then Bell will be the first North American carrier to sell one of the most coveted Android smartphones on the planet.

Recently, Motorola Droid Bionic was spotted with a Best Buy Mobile promotional shot that is traversing the Web. The leaked promo described Droid Bionic to be a ferocious force and an unstoppable powerful device. But, the biggest question remains whether the smartphone will last even if it makes a splash in the beginning. If we consider HTC Thunderbolt 4G LTE smartphone, it was in fact outselling even Apple iPhone 4 for a while at Verizon.

Motorola confirmed via Twitter that its much anticipated Verizon LTE phone will arrive this summer.

Galaxy S2 will be coming in four versions in the U.S. -- Function at Verizon, Attain for AT&T, and Within for Sprint Nextel, and a T-Mobile version. Motorola Droid Bionic will only be featured in Verizon.

Motorola Droid Bionic is a candy bar-style smartphone with support of modern 4G technology from Verizon LTE network. The phone seems to be strong and portable with Android 2.2 Froyo installed in it. It can be easily upgraded to 2.3 Gingerbread anytime. If the battery life clicks for Motorola Droid Bionic, then most probably Samsung Galaxy S2 will have very stiff competition from it.

Both Android devices from Samsung and Motorola are offering quite a blazing performance at the hand of dual-core processing power. But, there still could be a thing or two that would make you choose one over the other.

Here is a comparison between Motorola Droid Bionic and Samsung Galaxy S2:

Operating system:

Motorola Droid Bionic will run on Google Android Froyo 2.2, but may be updated to Android Gingerbread 2.3 when Final product comes out. On the other hand, Galaxy S2 runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread which is the latest smartphone version of Android OS.

Though Froyo isn't quite as refined as Gingerbread, it has true multi-tasking support, Wi-Fi hotspot tethering and Adobe Flash support. But in Gingerbread, the user interface is refined, the soft keyboard and copy/paste features have been improved, and support for near field communication (NFC) has been added.

Screen:

Galaxy S 2 sports a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen with 800x480 screen resolution. On the other hand, Droid Bionic comes with upgraded 4.5-inch qHD TFT capacitive touchscreen with 960x540 pixel resolution.

Dimension and Weight:

Initial specification of Motorola Droid Bionic shows 125.9 x 66.9 x 13.3 mm and weighs up to 158g, while Samsung Galaxy S2 has a dimension of 125.3 x 66.1 x 8.5 mm and weighs 116 g.

Processor:

Galaxy S 2 is powered by a dual-core 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 Mali-400MP GPU Orion processor with 1GB RAM. The processor supposedly announced in Bionic was 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 ULP GeForce GPU Tegra 2 chipset processor, but rumored upgrade is expected to be Texas Instruments OMAP4 1.2 GHz processor with expected RAM to be upgraded from 512MB to 1GB.

Camera:

Samsung's Galaxy S2 has an 8-megapixel 3264 x 2448 pixels camera with auto-focus, LED flash, geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection and image stabilization. Droid Bionic has similar megapixel camera with auto-focus, dual-LED flash, geo-tagging, face detection and image stabilization. But, Droid Bionic Camera supports dual LED flash not a tactile dot.

The initial spec of Bionic was a video capture at 720 at 30 fps but the upgrade is expected to be 1080p while Galaxy S2 captures video at 1080 at 30 fps. However, Galaxy S2 has 2-megapxiel camera compared to Droid Bionic’s VGA camera.
Storage: Galaxy S 2 boasts of 16/32 GB internal storage and via a microSD card slot it can expand up to 32 GB. Motorola Droid Bionic will feature 16GB internal storage and via a microSD card slot it can expand up to 32 GB.

Input features:

Both the smartphones have common input features like accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate, multi-touch input method and proximity sensor for auto turn-off. Galaxy S2 has features like Gorilla Glass display, TouchWiz UI v4.0 and Gyroscope sensor. Droid Bionic is expected to include the latest version of Motorola’s custom user interface, mostly to accommodate the unlocked bootloader option and the user interface is expected to be similar to Motorola Photon 4G.

3G:

Motorola's smartphone gives Rev. A up to 3.1 Mbps and LTE whereas Samsung's smartphone offers HSDPA up to 21 Mbps and HSUPA up to 5.76 Mbps.

WLAN/Bluetooth/ USB:

The Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n DLNA is common in both smartphones but the Galaxy S2 has an added Wi-Fi Direct feature. Bionic uses 2.1 Bluetooth version with A2DP and EDR. Although USB version 2.0 is featured in both smartphones, Galaxy S2 has microUSB (MHL) and USB.

Battery:

Galaxy S2 features a Li-Ion 1650 mAh battery but Motorola Droid Bionic betters it with a Li-Po 1930 mAh battery.

Other common features:

The other common features in both the smartphones include 3.5 mm jack, loudspeaker, SMS threaded view, MMS, Email, Push Mail, IM, HTML browser, games, Java via third party application, digital compass, A-GPS support, SNS integration, Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Google Talk, Adobe Flash 10.1 support, voice-memo-dial-commands and predictive text input.

Other features found in Bionic are HDMI port and active noise cancellation with dedicated mic. Galaxy S2 extra features include stereo FM radio with RDS, optional NFC support and TV-out via MHL A/V link.

Pricing:

The Galaxy S 2 is expected to be priced at $599 to $699 for unlocked 16GB version, while the locked version to be sold on contract from U.S. wireless carriers is expected to be in the $250 to $300+ price range. Motorola Droid Bionic is expected to be priced at $479, but a $149.99 price tag at Amazon or Verizon store is also speculate.

Conclusion:

The specifications of both the phones look very promising. Galaxy S2 sports a 2MP front-facing camera for video chat better than Droid Bionic's 0.3MP VGA camera. Samsung Galaxy S2 looks bright, intelligent and eye-catching, and its ultra thin design may be the most important factor that steals the hearts. Also Galaxy S2 HD 1080p video capture more than just developing Droid bionic supports 720p video recording.

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