[HTC Rezound] jasoncd:
I had been watching the Nexus for some time before it's launch. My Droid X in all honesty was probably fine - it was overclocked, undervolted and running the latest MIUI built on ICS - but I had my mind set on the GN as the next big thing. I was travelling for work on launch day, but was able to swing by a Verizon store and pick one up late in the afternoon.

First impressions after getting a chance to check it out in my hotel room were extremely positive. The 4.65" display is immediately eye-catching. Colors just pop off the screen, and some of the more colorful icons against a black app drawer background were really great looking. This was my first 4g phone, and the speeds were pretty amazing too. Driving back from our meetings, I was playing with the phone (I wasn't the one driving!) and downloading apps off the market. I lost 4g a couple times, but I was in a mid sized city with lots of surrounding rural area. I live in DFW, so I wasn't too worried about the ability to hold a 4g connection there.

Now, I had seen the Rezound prior to the GN coming out. I can remember reading about it before it's release and thinking 'Oh great, another HTC phone that looks like every other HTC phone, but slightly faster'. I wasn't interested at all. But after going to see it in person, I really liked the phone. Comparing it to the then newly released RAZR, it was much nicer to hold. Phone felt solid, not as chunky as I had thought, and overall impressed me. But I was set on the GN!

Preamble out of the way, the GN had some flaws that I soon noticed. Nothing huge at first, but they became more apparent as time went on. Ultimately the reception or signal strength killed it for me, and I made the switch to the Rezound. I'll break it down into a comparison below to give you guys my take:

Form factor and physical

There has been a lot of talk about the GN's cheap build quality. I would disagree. The phone was plastic, yes, and it was really light, but to me it felt solid enough. There is also a lot of talk about the battery door, but again while it is flimsy on it's own, it snaps into the phone well. The door has 10+ points it snaps into, and once it's in it feels like a smooth, seamless part of the back of the phone. Especially with the extended battery. The downside is this is a pretty slick surface to hold a phone. Add in the width of the phone, which was slightly too big for me to hold one handed comfortably, and I was constantly worried I'd drop it.

The Rezound does feel a little more solid. It has a nice heft to it. With the extended battery, it has a significant heft to it. To me, the Rezound is easier to hold with either battery. The buttons are more flush with the phone and mounted in the traditional places, which I think I prefer. You don't accidentally hit them, but they're not hard to hit either. The downside, the big downside, is the creaking! Both my battery doors creak. For all the crap I've seen people give the GN for the battery door, at least it didn't creak every time I hit the left side of my keyboard.

The final decision here really comes up to screen size imo. The physical dimensions look close on paper, but the extra width and height are extremely noticeable when actually using the phone.

Screen

I talked about how the GN has that 'wow' factor. And it does. Some people call it over saturation, but man it looks good. Well, it looks good until you play with a Rezound for 10 minutes. When I was at the VZW store thinking about switching my GN for a Rezound, I was not as impressed by the screen on the Rezound at first. And I think the reason why is Sense or Gingerbread. The UI, wallpapers, notification bar, font, etc. all are much more professional and attractive on the GN. The Rezound looked terrible in stock form IMO. Giant ugly fonts, widgets with cartoonish graphics, nothing took advantage of or looked good on the Rezound screen. But comparing the same websites and applications side by side, and the Rezound quickly became the clear winner. Colors are much more clear and natural looking. On a forum app I use often, I could not tell the difference in alternating dark blues used on alternating posts. On the Rezound it was clear as day. And after getting the Rezound setup by removing Sense and getting Go Launcher, it eliminates a lot of my initial distaste. I have the Rezound as the clear winner here. However, the difference between 4.65" and 4.3" is big. If you don't mind the AMOLED tech, the bigger screen might win you over. I did find it funny though that with the on screen buttons, I could see a good bit more vertically of every web page on the Rezound.

One last thought, I read on my phone a lot. Kindle app using white text on a black background. The blacks of the AMOLED are amazing, but text is not as crisp as on the LCD.

Software

I'll be brief here. ICS has some bugs or kinks to work out. This should be expected with it's first release. It's got a lot of good things going for it too though. If it were an option on the Rezound, I'd take it. Sense it's too invasive for me, and part of me buying the Rezound was due to my research here knowing that I could easily remove Sense (thanks Scott's Roms!). The Rezound does have some nice touches though. I like the lock screen more. The camera software is great and the shutter lag is close to the GN's. Dismissing or going into calendar reminders from the lockscreen is really good too. Overall the GN wins, but the Rezound with a little tweaking beats the GN in some areas while falling short in others. This was closer than I would have first guessed.

Battery

I didn't test either phone extensively with the stock batteries. With my short use on the Rezound's stock battery, I was impressed it was able to seemingly last a good amount of time with only 1650 mah. That battery size is too small for a LTE phone IMO, and with the physical size of the battery I think HTC could have given us something better.

The GN with the 2100 mah extended battery lasts all day. At 24 hours off the charger, I would typically be between 10 and 20% battery life left. Not too bad for an LTE phone, but I think software hurts it here. Looking at my battery usage graph, there is a lot of 'awake' time where my screen is off. This seems to be somewhat common with the GN, so there may be some process keeping the phone awake. Lots of people suggests disabling some sound options (sound on keypress and something else I think), which I did, but did not notice an impact.

The Rezound, with the 2750 mah extended battery kicks the crap out of the GN. Not really apples to apples due to the larger size, but I unplugged 31 hours ago and have 58% battery left. The awake time and screen time match up almost perfectly, which is also probably giving the Rezound a healthy edge here.

Camera

I'm not much of a camera person, just not that good at it and I don't know how to adjust ISO and other camera settings to make the shot better. With everything set to auto, the Rezound takes better looking pictures, at least in the situations I was snapping photos in. Pretty much 100% in doors. With a pro behind the lense, I'm not sure how that would change.

Reception

This is the big one for me, the one that made me spending several days reading about these phones and ultimately trading the GN in. Once I got the GN home to DFW, I was a little surprised at the reception. Just going by the bars at first, it seemed low at my house and 'okay' at work. While at my house, I booted up my Droid X and did some side by side testing. The DX was hitting -88 to -93 on average, while the GN was above -100 everywhere, at times hitting -113!

Now, after some reading online, I discovered that the GN was giving me the LTE signal, while the DX was giving me the CDMA signal. But by setting the GN to CDMA only, it would report the CDMA signal to me, giving me a better comparison. After doing this, the GN range dropped down to -93 to -103. Not great at all, but enough to hold a signal in 3g. The problem though was how slow the phone switched radios. Going from 4g to 3g would take up to a minute. Further testing lead to some cases of dropping a 3g signal, altough surprisingly it did hold onto the 4g signal despite the worse signal strength. I ran the SpeedTest app multiple times every night for 10 day, and the highest speed I saw was 8,200 kbps down, 4,400 up.

An even bigger shocker though was the wifi performance. I have a weight bench in my garage, and like to listen to Pandora on my phone while working out. The GN had zero bars of wifi (but would stay connected...mostly) and would take 10 seconds between tracks to buffer. My DX had 3 bars of wifi (I know, bars are not apples to apples and sucks as a measurement) and would play Pandora seamlessly. My house is small, the router is pretty high end and not that far away. Bad 3g, bad 4g and bad wifi had me feeling pretty bummed about the phone. To be fair, I never had a great signal on the DX at my house either, but as the above numbers show, it was better than the GN.

To sum up the GN, I travelled for Christmas and visited some areas with marginal service and some areas that should have had good service, according the VZW's coverage map. I had my brother's cheap-o Samsung Android Sprint phone to test side by side. The GN lost or tied every time. The kicker was when we were in downtown Bryan, TX, which is right next door to College Station and should have had great coverage. I had no signal at all the entire time we were in Bryan. This was not during VZW's 4g outage. My brother had a signal in the -80's on his Samsung.

That was what sent me to the VZW store Christmas eve to check out the Rezound. They had it right next to a display GN. I tested all three phones in terms of signal. They would fluctuat slightly, but the high/low for both my GN and the display model were the same. -78 to -83. The Rezound was -66 to -72. Both GNs were set to CDMA only. At this point I'm thinking 'Okay, the Rezound is better. It's only 10 or 12 db, but that would put me in a much better spot with the numbers I was getting at my house.' Then I decided to run the SpeedTest app. I used both display models for this, and made sure they were hitting the same server. The results were consistent between runs. The Rezound hit 24,000 down and 11,000 up. The GN hit 14,000 down and 6,000 up. I repeated this again and again. Obviously both phones were switched to 4g for this test. I then repeated the GN results with my phone, and walked over to the VZW rep and said 'Hi I'd like to return my GN for a Rezound please'.

I haven't done extensive testing on the Rezound since being back home (unpacking, catching up with friends... you understand). But I ran SpeedTest right when I got home. 30,600 down and 9,900 up. After that I just smiled and felt fine about doing more testing later. What I can't make out though, is why so many online reviews and articles seem to thing there isn't a problem with the GN. Maybe it's a problem with only some GNs? Anandtech articles I respect very highly. They know their stuff, and always have a great technical analysis. Their article on GN signal issues just confused me, because it seemed to say there was no problem. I don't know, I did a lot of testing with the GN. I wanted to keep it! I won't bore you with all the details, but I lost signal five miles from DFW airport in a busy shopping center. I did many, many side by side SpeedTest runs with my buddy and his Bionic. I feel like I gave the GN every chance to perform. I will say that at work my GN was -93 to -100 on 4g signal, and at times I'd hit 24,00 down, which was very close to what the Bionic was pulling.

My take-away was that with a great signal, the GN will perform. With a poor signal, the GN does a good job of holding on to that signal. But the GN radio just can't get a signal as well as some other phones, and the Rezound gets a great signal in comparison.

Miscellaneous

The GN is quick. Transitions are seamless, apps open fast and market downloads install in no time. The Rezound is also quick. As quick? Not really. There's still some slight hesitation here or there. I'd say it's more software than hardware. If you put any stock into benchmarks, the GN did 5,850 in Antutu and the Rezound did 5,640.

The Rezound is chunky with the extended battery. But I like it better than the GN in terms of feel in the hand.

Um...if you made it this far, anything else you want to know?

Cliff Notes:GN and Rezound are both good devices. The GN had signal issues that prevented it from being something I'd want to own and use. The Rezound is better than it looks on paper and as a whole package works really well.