Battle Between HTC EVO 3D, Motorola Droid Bionic Heats Up

By Elias Samuel | July 06 2011 11:22 AM

As HTC's EVO 3D is heading for T-Mobile and the Motorola Droid Bionic has gone through FCC approval, both smartphones have shown promising features to attract consumers.

Netflix HD/ Credit: Engadget
Qualcomm Krait Leaked
Verizon Data Plan Leaked

The HTC EVO 3D 4G is the first glasses-free 3D smartphone, which makes the phone an adventure for early adopters. It is the successor to the original HTC EVO 4G, most probably the only hit among the smartphones that gave very stiff competition to Apple's iPhone 4 in 2010. Hence, the EVO 3D 4G may be the HTC's answer for the year 2011 in trying to claim the top spot.

Moreover, Sprint's version of HTC EVO 3D is already out in the market and has become a hot-selling product. But few consumers of the smartphone on various forums reported about software glitches and an overheating issue, as the phone was reported to be charging at a higher voltage level than normal when connected to the official USB charging docks. Sprint has been replacing the known and affected units.

Meanwhile, a leaked Verizon Wireless screenshot has revealed that the Motorola Droid Bionic will be released on Aug. 4 and that another phone, the Motorola Droid 3, will drop on July 14. Initially, Droid Bionic was expected to be released with a dual-core Tegra 2 chipset made by NVIDIA but now the device will most probably come with a dual-core ARM-based OMAP chipset from Texas Instruments. The latest news about Texas Instruments shows that the new OMAP 4 platform has been certified for Netflix and enables secure HD (1080p) streaming to HD TVs. Hence, the assumption of Droid Bionic along with Droid 3 to come with Netflix HD is a possibility. But the Texas representative says that if a smartphone comes with an OMAP 4 processor, it does not necessarily mean that it will operate Netflix HD because each device must go through Netflix certification. The only handset to pass through the certification with OMAP 4 processor and Netflix is the LG Thrill 4G, another 3D smartphone, the main rival of HTC EVO 3D.

Netflix
Netflix HD/ Credit: Engadget

The Motorola Droid Bionic is poised to be the most powerful 4G LTE Android smartphone based on its specs sheet compared to Verizon’s other smartphones like HTC's Thunderbolt, Samsung Droid Charge and LG Revolution. But the consumers who were waiting for Droid Bionic to be featured in Verizon’s unlimited data plan have to deal with the new tiered pricing structure. Predictably, the new plan will go into effect from July 7. The new pricing structure offers customers monthly plans of $30 for 2GB of data, $50 for 5GB of data and $80 for 10GB of data. A $10 plan for 75MB of data is available to customers of feature phones with limited Internet capabilities.

Verizon
Verizon Data Plan Leaked

Apart from Texas Instruments, the Qualcomm Snapdragon roadmap leaks reveals that the next generation Snapdragon chips codenamed Krait, the dual-core will run in speeds ranging from 1.5GHz to 1.7GHz and come with the latest Adreno 225 GPU beginning in Q4 2011. Also, leaks detailing the firm’s mobile processor plans for its system-on-a-chip (SoC) are circulating showing speeds of up to a 2.5 GHz quad-core ARM-based processor complete with Adreno 320 GPU for 2D and 3D graphics, most probably in Q1 2013. (Qualcomm PDF).

Qualcomm Krait Leaked

Meanwhile, here's a comparison of the Motorola Droid Bionic with the HTC EVO 3D:

Size: The initial specification of Motorola Droid Bionic shows 125.9 x 66.9 x 13.3 mm dimension for the 4.3-inch display it had, and weighs around 158 g. But as the phone is said to be upgraded to 4.5-inch display, the dimension and weight are expected to vary. The HTC EVO 3D has a dimension of 126 x 65 x 12.1 mm and weighs 170g.

Display: HTC EVO 3D comes with 4.3-inch qHD 540 x 960 pixels 3D LCD capacitive touchscreen display compared to Motorola Droid Bionic’s upgraded 4.5-inch qHD TFT capacitive touchscreen with 540 x 960 pixel resolution.

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. HTC EVO 3D will come with HTC Sense's latest version, touch-sensitive controls and Gyro sensor. Droid Bionic is expected to include the latest version of Motorola’s custom user interface, mostly to accommodate the unlocked bootloader option. The user interface is expected to be similar to Motorola Photon 4G.

Memory: HTC EVO 3D has 1 GB RAM and 1 GB of internal storage. And Motorola Droid Bionic will feature 16 GB internal storage and 2 GB ROM but RAM is expected to be upgraded from 512 MB to 1 GB.

3G: The HTC’s smarpthone has HSDPA 14.4 Mbps and HSUPA 5.76 Mbps support. Motorola’s smartphone will have Rev. A up to 3.1 Mbps LTE support.

WLAN/Bluetooth/USB: The EVO 3D smartphone from HTC has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, WiMAX 802.16 e, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot while Droid Bionic has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot. But HTC EVO 3D will come with Bluetooth version 3.0 with A2DP, EDR and has microUSB version (MHL) 2.0 whereas Droid Bionic upgrade may see a higher version of Bluetooth from the initial version of 2.1.

Camera: The camera found in EVO 3D is a 5-megapixel 2560?1920 pixels camera along with autofocus, dual-LED flash, Stereoscopic photos (2 MP only) & videos and a 1.3-megapxiel secondary camera. The Motorola phone has an 8-megapixel 3264x2448 pixels camera with autofocus, dual-LED flash, geo-tagging, face detection, image stabilization and a secondary VGA camera. The initial spec of Bionic was a video capture at 720 at 30 fps but the upgrade is expected to be 1080p while EVO 3D captures video of 1080p at 24fps (2D) and 720p at 30fps (3D).

Operating system: HTC EVO 3D has Android OS version 2.3 (Gingerbread) but Motorola Droid Bionic OS is yet to be confirmed.

Processor: The processor found in HTC EVO 3D is 1.2 GHz dual-core processor Adreno 220 GPU Qualcomm MSM8660 chipset. But 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 TI OMAP4 1.2 GHz processor.

Battery: The battery details of HTC EVO show that it has Li-Ion 1730 mAh giving a talk time up to 7 h 45 min but Motorola Droid Bionic is better 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, active noise cancellation with dedicated mic, organizer, document viewer, digital compass, A-GPS support, SNS integration, Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Google Talk, voice-memo-dial-commands and predictive text input.

Other features found in Bionic are HDMI port, MP3/WAV/WMA/AAC+ player and MP4/WMV/H.263/H.264 player. HTC EVO 3D extra features include TV-out via MHL A/V link, MP3/AAC+/WAV/WMA player, MP4/Xvid/H.263/H.264/WMV player and Picasa integration.