iPhone 4S Not as Good as Androids, Says Consumer Reports

The leading US product critic, Consumer Reports takes a better look on iPhone 4S and found out that it's still not as good as its Android competitions.

In a report released Tuesday, the enhancement made to iPhone 4S scored a higher rating than the iPhone 4, but fall short to outscore the new Android based phones in the market.

But we can never tell unless we take a hold of the iPhone 4S and take it side by side its leading Android rival, the Samsung Galaxy SII.

First up is the operating system. iPhone runs exclusively on iOS5 1 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU, Apple A5. It is equally powerful as the Samsung Galaxy SII's Android Gingerbread Dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, Mali-400MP GPU, Exynos chipset.

The open source OS of the Galaxy SII, or other Android mobile devices at that, makes it very convenient to customize your preferred application as compared to the Apple iOS5 that is limited to exclusive third party applications.

This makes iPhone 4S different from others. You cannot just add any applications you want for your iPhone 4S unless it's partnered with Apple or purchase it from the App Store. Android applications on the other hand if not free only requires minimal fee and can be downloaded to numerous Android App Markets.

Its physical attributes come next. Though iPhone 4S seems smaller than the Samsung Galaxy in terms of dimension (the iPhone 4S measures 115.2 x 58.6 x 9.3 mm while Samsung Galaxy SII is at 125.3 x 66.1 x 8.5 mm), don't you think bigger is better in terms of display when Galaxy SII has 4.3" Super AMOLED plus touchscreen while iPhone 4S only shows 3.5" screen.

It's also good to note that iPhone 4S lacks external storage support, unlike other mobile device with a good internal memory and still is expandable for better file management.   

Weight makes iPhone 4S heavier as it hits the scale at 140g while Galaxy SII only weighs 116g as it is made lightweight enclosure. Both phones have the same 8MP rear camera. Apple upgraded the camera's touch focus, geo tagging and face detection, a fron VGA camera, and video recording with image stabilization feature. Samsung goes one notch higher as it brags camera elements of geo tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, image stabilization plus a 2MP front camera.

But the head to head comparison is a not as good as recent report that confirms Apple iPhone 4S loss over Samsung Galaxy SII being named as the Phone of the Year during the recently concluded Stuff Gadget Awards 2011.

Same thing happened in October 2011 during the T3 Gadget Awards 2011, iPhone 4 lost the title Phone of the Year to Samsung Galaxy SII.

It goes to show that Apple iPhone 4S still has a lot of room for improvement, particularly in catching up the Androids. After all, there's a growing list of Android phones that just waits launching, so Apple better watch out.