Not a week after finishing the final draft of an article discussing the iPhone’s superiority over phones such as the Droid and Nexus One (basically Android OS phones) for attorneys, an analysis by DisplayMate has revealed the Nexus One’s screen, while offering a higher resolution in icon displays actually lacks the sharpness and correct coloring of images and video of the iPhone. Of course, this was too late to include in my article but it is important nonetheless as it is a perfect example of ‘more is not always better’. You see, Google has been touting the Nexus One’s higher resolution OLED display, coming in at 800×480, as being far superior to the iPhone’s 480×320 LCD display. But in the epitome of the saying, these extra pixels do not equate to better images as we see in the photo below (Nexus One on the left and iPhone on the right).
As you can see, the color gradient of the Nexus One has a number of skipped ‘steps’ of coloring when contrasted with the smooth gradient through color intensities as seen on the iPhone. This is caused by the Nexus One display only being capable of displaying 16-bit color which allows for only 64 intensity levels for the color green and 32 levels for red and blue. The is very common on cheap low-end lcd’s but is completely unacceptable in a $500 device. The 16-bit display further causes problems when viewing photographs and video, resulting in poorly rendered images with over-saturated colors, gray-scale tracking errors and a host of other problems. This case be best shown in the image below (again Nexus One on the left and iPhone on the right):
Obviously, the Nexus One is not the “super phone” is has been touted to be and while it may display icons much more sharply than the iPhone, what good is that once you’ve opened a program and are attempting to actually view images or video? Once again I have a feeling we will hear the standard argument of ‘the NEXT version will be the iPhone killer”. At what point are these arguments going to be seen for what they are – cover-ups for the inadequacy of the current offering of phones.
If you’re an attorney looking to buy the best smartphone, heed my advise from my soon-to-be-published article and do yourself a favor, buy an iPhone.