Quad core Smartphone Showdown

2011 marked they year when the first dual core phone was released, powered by Tegra 2 chip, the Optimus 2x by LG was the pick of the hardware. It had been only a year since the Optimus 2x set its impression on the market that more powerful and advance Quad core chips started to pop up. It was in late 2011 that the first Quad core chip by snapdragon was officially announced and appropriately we saw the first ever Quad core phone.

Now I have been a firm believer that phones do not need a quad core chip, it’s just resources being wasted on phones, but then again if you are a heavy gamer or tend to suck power out of your device the n it might not be enough for you; we are rounding up the quad core smartphones for you and will suggest the best one according to their specifications, power, performance and pricing. Here are the contenders.

• Samsung Galaxy SIII
• Huawei Ascend D quad
• HTC ONE X
• LG Optimus 4X HD
• Meizu MX-4 core

So these are you contenders for the quad core frontier. Let’s start with the Design.

Screen

Here we will discuss which phone has more to offer when it comes to design and features.

• Samsung Galaxy SIII 4.8” Phone with a 720p resolution and sports a corning gorilla glass, aka Gorilla glass 2 and has a pixel density of 306ppi.
• Huawei Ascend D quad features a 4.5” screen with a 720p resolution and 326ppi lacks Gorilla glass 2.
• HTC ONE X is a 4.7” Phone with screens resolution of 720p and pixel density of 312ppi features a gorilla glass as well.
• LG Optimus 4X HD 4.7” screen with 720p resolution with 312ppi pixel density, Gorilla glass protects the screen from scratches as well.
• Meizu MX-4 features a 4” screen with 640 x 960 resolutions and 216ppi pixel density, gorilla glass is absent as well.

Although the Galaxy SIII has a lower pixel density, but the sAMOLED technology that is used in making of its screen has an advantage above the others, however the contrast ratio of “o” feels unnatural but then again delivering beautiful pictures in sunlight. So in terms of display it really is a matter of choice, the meizu MX-4 however foes not shine in the Screen area while the remaining are on par with galaxy SIII.

Winner: Huawei

Battery

A good smartphone is nothing without a good battery, you can have a quad core phone with excellent camera and display but it will be rather useless if it won’t even last you a day. Good news however for the future buyers of these phones, they are equipped with long lasting batteries, let’s see what they have packed in them.

• Galaxy SIII is powered by 2100 mAh battery
• Huawei Ascend D quad 1800 mAh battery
• HTC ONE X by 1800 mAh battery as well
• Optimus 4X-HD is packed with the most powerful 2150 mAh battery
• Meizu MX-4 is powered with a modest 1700 mAh battery

Winner: On the basis of power, LG Optimus 4X-HD takes the top battery ranking

Talk time

Battery power aside; how a phone utilizes the resources is another important factor in judging how good a phone is, even though the Optimus $X-HD has the largest battery; it has the lowest talk time off all the five contenders.

• Galaxy SIII 10:20 Hours
• Huawei Ascend D quad 9:05 Hours
• HTC ONE X 9:57 Hours
• Optimus 4X-HD 7:41 Hours
• Meizu MX-4 10:00 Hours

So you see, Meizu had the smallest battery pack but fared well in the talk time test delivering the second best score among the contenders.

Winner: Galaxy SIII

Operating System and features

Coming on to the business end, Samsung, HTC, LG and Meizu have all decided to push aside the “Vanilla” interface and cooked up their own. As we are familiar with Samsung’s touchwiz UI and HTC’s polished Sense UI, they have been updated for the phones. Overall the feel from HTC Sense 4.0 is more pleasing and both the touchwiz and sense are packed with extra features on top of what we get in stock android, features like HDR camera, taking snaps while recording video, SRS sound and many more to count. However, when it comes to features alone – Samsung has the upper hand with their S-Voice which is like Siri for iOS. But that will change once jellybean hits the HTC.

LG runs Optimus UI 3.0 which shows off a little bit of vanilla essence as well (not a bad thing in particular) , they have polished it off since launching it on the older Optimus series, but still it doesn’t come at par with HTC’s magnificent Sense UI. Meizu on the other hand runs a UI that was designed to resemble that of iPhone. Almost everything is Identical; it runs what they like to call it flymeOS which does seem short on features as compared to LG, HTC and Samsung. And finally there is Huawei, which runs the stock Vanilla interface, the display and since Android 4.0 onwards had design improvements, it is not bad at all and we don’t mind using the vanilla interface as it is faster and has more customization options. However having said that HTC is still ahead because of their Sense UI and it is an easy victory for them.

Winner: HTC ONE X

CPU Benchmarks

We shall now focus on the processing capabilities, yes the Quad Core territory.  Since the Huawei is not officially released yet so the benchmarks for that would be missing, having said that; Huawei is said to have the most powerful processor of the lot. (results source gsmarena)

Benchmark Pi

(Lower is better)

Winner: HTC One X

ANTUTU

(Higher is better)

Winner: Meizu core

ANTUTU RAM

(Higher is better)

Winner: Meizu core

Quadrant

(Higher the better)

Winner: Galaxy SIII (Meizu putting up a fight)

While Meizu scores victory in the CPU performance, no phone comes near the Galaxy SIII in GPU performance thanks to the Mali GPU400. So in a clear run the galaxy SIII would be the hardware of choice. We are not biased towards the Galaxy SIII believe me when I say that I wanted the Optimus 4X-HD to shine through test; but Samsung has put up an amazing device for us.

Camera

Coming to a close to the end, we now focus our attention on the camera, all the devices have a 8 megapixel camera on board and all have a video shooting capability at 1080p. They share the same statistics when it comes to the flash, a single LED powered flash i.e. but the feature we missed the most is the lack of shutter key on all devices. Since the camera specifications are almost the same, it had to come down to features they provide, for features; the HTC sense has an upper hand with the ability of ‘Group Shots” which can prove to be useful. And considering the sample shots – Galaxy SIII is the clear winner in the camera department.

Winner: Galaxy SIII

Conclusion

Clearly galaxy SIII dominated all the way, starting off with the screen, the design had a little stutter with the Operating system and The CPU performance but came back strong with impressive GPU and camera performance. However, even though it is a monster of a device; it is the most expensive of the lot as well.

Meizu being the cheapest gave the high end phones a run for their money, this dark horse out performed in the CPU department, sadly enough it is let down by its display quality; otherwise it is best for the price range it offers. We had high hopes for LG Optimus 4X-HD, but it never really shone or outperformed the competition in any department, it did stay strong throughout but we were expecting better performance out of it.

And then there is the HTC ONE X, which is a beautiful phone with the best design and built quality, powered by HTC sense, it delivers the best user experience and with jellybean almost on the way – it will surely add more features for us to enjoy.

The underdog i.e. Huawei hasn’t released yet, but the specifications are mindboggling, we are sure if it had been released and was the part of analysis it would have shone. Unfortunately we will have to wait a little to see what it can do. So if you are looking for most powerful smartphone out there and have a little extra cash to spare the galaxy SIII is the top device for you, otherwise I would be happy to settle with ONE X or the Optimus 4X-HD.