The Verge, aka the engadget guys next biased blog

So some of the guys from Engadget decided to leave that sinking ship and start their own thing. The started a blog called “this is my next thing site” which later became “The verge”.

Unfortunately, the seem to have kept to the Apple-bias that made Engadget famous. For example, consider the following comparison between Apple iphone 4S and Samsung Galaxy SII:

The highlighted cells shows which phone does best in the corresponding category. Looking at this comparison, most people would go “wow, the iphone 4S is in every aspect better than iphone 4 and it seems to also outperform galaxy SII in most cases”. This is however far from the true…

OH REALLY??

You see, this comparison was constructed to make the 4S look better than it is:

• processor: the 4S and the galaxy have the same dual core A9 processor. The galaxy is however faster (iphone 0.8-1.0 GHz vs galax 1.2 and 1.5 GHz). I dont really understand how this two can be equal. IMO galaxy wins.
• Price on contract: The galaxy is as cheap as the cheapest 4S. This should be a clear “win” for the galaxy.
• Display: as the consumers have already shown, the larger phone is better for browsing. So the larger galaxy display should be considered a win in this category by many people.
• Display again: IPS vs. SAMOLAD+ ?? Are you kidding me, this is really no contest, galaxy wins.
• Display: the iphone has higher resolution than galaxy. Is this a good thing? Maybe, maybe not. Research has shown that you don’t really see a difference once you go below a certain pixel size. The reason iphone resolution is higher is because Jobs wanted the 2x resolution of the old phone to allow easy “scaling” of old apps (just draw 1 pixel as 2×2 pixels). Not because this was a magical resolution where everything looked better.
• Cellular: The galaxy is available with all kind of configurations for different markets. It also got LTE (aka 4G) which iphone doesnt have. Galaxy wins.
• Global roaming on CDMA: dont know what this is. observe however that they are comparing the CDMA version of 4S against a non-CDMA version of galaxy. So the comparison is not meaningful.
• Camera: cant say much on this. Maybe 4S should take home this category.
• Video: seems like a tie
• Storage: the galaxy has a microSD slot, 4S has no memory slot. Galaxy wins because you can have multiple number of memory cards and swap between then depending on the task (e.g. you can have for work and one at home). you can also transfer large files faster by using you computer to write to the memory card.
• wifi: hey, look! galaxy actually won this one in the eye of the verge guys too.
• siri: oh my god!! iphone 4S has “siri”!! it is clearly better than galaxy!!! or is it?? First of all, “siri” is an Apple marketing term for the voice control software in 4S. Android have had voice control since a couple of versions back. So I guess galaxy wins this category by having the more polished and stable (its couple of android generations old now) voice control compared to the new and unproved “siri”??
• battery life: i dont know much about that. but according to GSM arena, the talk time for galaxy is somewhere between 9 and 18.30 hours (depending on cellular technology i guess), so once more, galaxy wins.
• weight: galaxy wins, but this category is really stupid. who cares about 10 grams up or down??
• dimensions: galaxy wins: not only it has a large display, it is also thinner. But once more, who gives a crap about 1mm here or there?

So there you have it. The tables you just saw was artificially constructed to make iphone 4S “win” over galaxy SII. This so called comparison was pure BS, and so are the Verge guys too.