Samsung Fascinate vs Motorola DROID X

Introduction:

There’s no question about it, the Motorola DROID X has been one of the hottest Android phones for Verizon this summer, but a few weeks ago the Samsung Fascinate hit the stores and turned the heat up even more. Both of these Android devices are the top-tier on Verizon’s smartphone line-up and come in at $199.99 (after rebate with 2 year contract). However, there are some clear differences between them, which we are going to take a look at, such as their displays, performance, form and feel. If you want even more in-depth information, be sure to check out our full reviews of the Motorola DROID X and Samsung Fascinate.

Design:

Let’s face it. Selecting a phone often comes down to which one you think looks best as a personal preference. To that extent, the Samsung Fascinate has a more streamlined appearance and looks a bit more glamorous, but that’s where we start to have issues, as its plastic construction is a fingerprint magnet and always feels slippery in your hands. Conversely, the Motorola DROID X might not win any fashion awards, but it feels more durable with its metal construction and the soft-touch coating on the back provides a nice grip. The Fascinate is also slightly smaller, about 0.10” less in height, and also doesn’t have the “camera hump” that is found on the DROID X. Because of this, it fits better in smaller hands and in slim pockets.




One key difference between these two devices are the displays, as the Samsung Fascinate uses a 4” Super AMOLED screen with 480x800 resolution, while the Motorola DROID X comes with a larger 4.3” TFT LCD screen with 480x854 resolution. There’s no denying the fact that the Super AMOLED screen on the Fascinate shows images and videos with greater color saturation and contrast, but for reading text (such as small text in web pages), we found the TFT display on the DROID X to have better fine detail without text looking jagged. That being said, viewing images and videos on the DROID X is by no means bad, but colors just don’t have the “pop” to them that you get with the Fascinate.


Even though most of the phone’s operations will be carried out by using the capacitive touchscreen, you still have four function buttons at the bottom, and here we prefer the physical buttons used by the Motorola DROID X as you have to press them down to get a response. The Samsung Fascinate has touch buttons, which can accidentally be pressed at any time by the slightest touch, so you have to be more careful about where you place your fingers. Both phones also have the standard volume rocker, power/lock button, 3.5mm headset jack, and microUSB port on the sides, but the DROID X adds a micro HDMI port so the phone can plug into an HDTV for viewing pictures and videos.

Interface and Software:

Being that both the Motorola DROID X and Samsung Fascinate are Android devices, they share commonalities, but there are differences in their features and in their user interface. This is because neither device is using the stock OS, but instead the DROID X is using Android 2.2 with some elements of BLUR, while the Fascinate is running Android 2.1 with Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. Because of this, both devices look and feel a bit different when using them, as the DROID X has three quick-launch icons on the bottom of the screen for opening the dialer, app drawer, and contacts, while the Fascinate has a fourth icon for messaging. Furthermore, the app drawer itself is the traditional vertical scrolling design on the Motorola DROID X, but the one on the Fascinate has to be swiped horizontally side-to-side. Another difference is with the selection of widgets, such as different clocks, weather, and social networking feeds, but we believe the ones included on the DROID X do a better job.



Naturally, you can also setup both devices to work with your POP, IMAP, and MS Exchange email accounts. After your accounts are setup on the Motorola DROID X, you can then go into the Messaging app that will show all your accounts (including text and Facebook messages), which all can be viewed together in the Universal Inbox, or separately by clicking on the account name. The Samsung Fascinate also lists your individual email accounts and has a combined inbox, but does not include text or Facebook messages with it.

For composing your messages, you’ll have to use the on-screen QWERTY keyboards, as neither device comes with a physical one. Having the bigger screen on the DROID X comes in handy here, as the keys are a bit larger than on the Fascinate, but we found both devices about equal in speed and reliability when typing. We also like that both come with the standard Android keyboard and the Swype keyboard.




One thing that the Motorola DROID X and Samsung Fascinate do well in is their web browsing experience, which is no surprise as both come with a WebKit based browser. Web pages are accurately displayed with a proper layout as they would appear on a PC. You can also zoom in and out by double tapping, or by using pinch-to-zoom. The only real difference that we noticed is with Flash sites, as the DROID X now comes with full Flash 10.1 support, allowing most all Flash content to work correctly, while the Fascinate only has the limited Flash Lite for now.

Camera and Multimedia:

With this class of phones, you should expect pretty good results with the camera, but once again there are a few differences. The Motorola DROID X comes with an 8MP autofocus camera, while the Samsung Fascinate “only” has a 5MP autofocus. For capturing an image, you have the traditional 2-stop shutter button on the DROID X, so you can press it half-way to focus first, and then all the way down to take the picture. But the Fascinate instead requires you to touch the screen to focus, and then to press the camera icon on the screen to take the picture. You can actually do this on-screen focus process with the DROID X as well, but we prefer using the standard 2-stop shutter button that is provided. Viewing images that we took outside, we noticed a clear difference between them. The ones from the DROID X were not only a bit sharper and clearer, but also exhibited better detail, color representation and saturation in a variety of scenes and exposures, while the Fascinate’s images looked a bit fuzzy and lacking in detail, as well as the colors not being as accurate. For inside images, the quality of both did go down, particularly in lower light levels, and this time there wasn't such a noticeable difference in terms of quality between the two handsets. Both do a good job with their LED flashes.





For video capturing, the Motorola DROID X (with the Android 2.2 update) and Samsung Fascinate are capable of recording in HD at 720p resolution with 30fps. Because of this, both will have smooth playback, but there seems to be a bit more detail with the DROID X video, as well as colors looking better. Furthermore, the DROID X records its embedded audio track in stereo and at a CD quality sample rate of 44kHz, but the Fascinate is limited to Mono sound at lower sample rate of 16kHz. We believe that the clear winner for taking pictures and videos is the Motorola DROID X.

Video Sample taken with the Samsung Fascinate:




Video Sample taken with the Motorola DROID X:



For playing back your music collection, the Samsung Fascinate replaces the standard and boring looking music player (like the one on the Motorola DROID X) with a more eye-appealing one. The tabs on the top of the Fascinate’s music player allow sifting through your collection by artist, album, and playlists, or display all at once, but the landscape mode brings along some nice eye candy, like CD cover flow or an alphabetical wheel to pick your music from. Aside from showing the album cover while playing a selection, we like how there's also an option to enable a visualization. Both the DROID X and Fascinate offer a variety of preset equalizer settings, though the Fascinate also has a 5.1 channel effect that is used when connecting wired headphones.



Chances are you’ll want to playback some videos or movies on such large screens, and both devices admirably handled our test files that come in a wide variety of formats, such as H.264 MP4, WMV, DivX and XviD, and with various resolutions and bitrates. Our test files top-out at 720p and the DROID X and Fascinate played them just fine. There were no hiccups or stutters as videos played smoothly and flawlessly. Due to the Super AMOLED screen on the Samsung Fascinate, it was almost like watching movies on a mini Plasma TV, though the Motorola DROID X was also nice due to the larger screen size.

Performance:

We are glad to report that both the Motorola DROID X and Samsung Fascinate did quite well in this area, but there is a slight advantage with the DROID X, as voices on our end sounded a bit more natural and with a wider frequency range. People that we called also said we sounded better on their end when we used the DROID X, which may have something to do with its noise-canceling mic. The signal reception also seemed to slightly favor the DROID X as it showed -91dBm, with the Fascinate showing -94dBm, though we didn’t drop any calls with either device.

The included 1540mAh battery on the Motorola DROID X was able to provide us up to 9.5 hours of talk time on a full charge, or about 36 hours of mixed usage, while the Samsung Fascinate was only able to provide 7 hours of talk time, or about 24 hours of mixed usage. For heavy users, it’s clear that you’ll get more battery time with the DROID X.

Under the hood on the Samsung Fascinate you’ll find a Cortex-A8 Hummingbird processor operating at 1GHz, along with 2GB of memory on-board, which is used for saving your apps, as well as 512MB of ROM and 384MB of RAM. The Motorola DROID X comes with a TI OMAP 3630 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, and 8GB of internal storage for apps. So what does all this mean for you? Simply put, both devices are fast. The Fascinate also excels more with 2D and 3D video game playback, with up to 50-60fps shown during the Quadrant Benchmark program, while the DROID X is limited to 30-45fps. Though the overall scores (which test the CPU, memory, I/O, 2D and 3D graphics) was 1400 on the DROID X with Android 2.2, and 900 on the Fascinate with Android 2.1.

Conclusion:

Like we said at the beginning, it really comes down to personal preference here, as both smartphones have a lot to offer. But overall, we believe the Motorola DROID X is a slight edge above the Samsung Fascinate. This is because the DROID X was recently updated to Android 2.2 (the Fascinate is still on queue for its 2.2 update), has a more reassuring, metal construction, takes better looking pictures, calls sound a bit more natural, and has longer battery times. The Fascinate is still a great device, and viewing movies on its Super AMOLED display is amazing, but in most other areas the Motorola DROID X does slightly better.

Software versions of the reviewed units:
Motorola DROID X: Android 2.2, Version 2.3.15, Kernel 2.6.32.9
Samsung Fascinate: Android 2.1, Build DH12, Kernel 2.6.29

Samsung Fascinate vs Motorola DROID X video comparison: