By At CES we showed you some awesome new features of the Sony Xperia Ion’s camera and promptly pitted them against the 0-delay shutter speed of the Galaxy Nexus. Here at MWC, we’ve just seen some fantastic new camera features of HTC Sense 4.0 and wanted to offer it the same opportunity to dethrone the GNEX for camera superiority. Here goes nothing:
There you have it: the HTC One X is the clear winner.
I did have trouble flawlessly unlocking the phone to the camera every time, but when done properly and combined with the much improved auto-focus speed, the HTC One X is not only feature-filled but extremely quick.
But would the HTC One X defeat the Sony Xperia Ion in a quick camera contest? To be honest, I highly doubt it, but we won’t know until we put them to the test. I’m mainly excited that mobile phone cameras are starting to see feature based attention beyond number of megapixels. I think the next 2 years will show huge growth and strides in the mobile phone and digital camera convergence area, and for that I’m extremely excited.
Cool. That’s the biggest thing these top of the line Android phones are lacking – better camera (imo)
smart video. thanks!
almost the same speed as my rezound. i’m not sure why that’s touted as a feature. That’s like linux fans claiming for years they could boot faster than windows boxes. Ultimately, no one cares anymore?
Camera boot time is huge… Especially if you take a lot of pictures, or attempt to capture anything on the spot. Even using the “Facial unlock” sucks because of the delay.
The only issue is that interface is wonky. Ive been running that new Sense on my phone for a while and that drag to camera feature requires a level of precision and patience that isnt good if you are in a hurry.
I suspect that the “oops I missed unlocking to the camera” situation is still the norm.
The difference is you are running it on outdated hardware which is another reason the camera app runs significantly better on these “updated” devices.
Huge until you realize your taking pics with a crappy camera phone. Not saying the phone is crappy, but rather every camera on a phone is crap.
Love you guys, but you HAVE to invest in a wireless lapel mic next year… Or at least a traditional mic on a cord… I couldn’t hear jack squat until I turned the bass all the way off and the treble all the way up.
Done and done.
Sorry but its on ATT so it can be a 1ms picture speed taking but the network still sucks.
The Galaxy Nexus IS the clear winner, because in a real world situation, you don’t get to retry unlocking the camera because it didn’t work the 1st time, and completely disregard the time you just wasted. Who cares if in a “perfect” situation when the unlock works “perfectly” it can “possibly” get to a picture sooner than the G-Nex, when the unlocking function doesn’t work perfectly every time. In your video in the time it took you to fail at opening the HTC One X, and then trying it a second time, 6 pics could have been taken on the Galaxy Nexus.
That’s a good and fair point. I agree. At its fastest the HTC One X was faster but I must admit, in testing the phone out I had trouble several times in unlocking it right away. Not just once. I tried to explain that in the article but could have made highlighted the point a bit more.
I wonder if that Nexus is running the latest 4.0.4 update which dramatically improved the camera app opening time and also made major improvements to focusing speed and accuracy.
I’m guessing it’s not 4.0.4 since it isn’t official yet.
Hmm, let’s see. A phone that has a slightly faster camera, or a phone that DOESN’T have Sense. Give me the Sense-less phone please.
Yet it still looks like its smoother than the gnex. I cant judge until i play with it, and the gnex is a wonderful phone, but its much less smoother than other handsets that came out before it like the gs2. So the fact that it’s skinless holds less weight unfortunately.
None of this matters because while HTC will update this phone to Jelly bean 5 months after google releases it, my GNex will have it immediately. Stock and Verizon’s network are too much to turn down.
Kinda like how the Galaxy S has ICS? Oh wait….
It was less than half a second faster – well isn’t it a bit unfair that the person who did the countdown held one of the phones? You can clearly see that he pressed his first button before the other guy. Pointless test.
I agree. It’s favoritism!
It was more of a fun test comparing the speeds than a scientific hypothesis, but your point is taken. I think a more important criticism is the fact that I couldn’t even unlock the screen the first time. That’s pretty failtastic.
Great job you guys. Just got the GN and now jealous of the Quad core HTC 1X. They both are great.
Sony is faster.
I want Android manufacturers to concentrate on the lens quality and give more attention to the software behind the camera hardware.
While none of us here will probably ever consider purchasing a Nokia 808 (38MP camera sensor on a phone, yo!!), what that company is doing with Carl Zeiss lens technology will hopefully filter down to us Android users eventually.
Come on Android hardware manufacturers: Get into bed with Carl Zeiss, give us your best lens balanced with cost, and smash the software that processes the camera images.Do that, and I’m pretty certain whichever Android manufacturer does it first will get a huge marketshare (providing they don’t sacrifice the other technical specs of the phone because of the added Carl Zeiss certification costs).
38mp would be madness man. no pro level dslr fullframe has 38mp, photographers are even complaining about the new nikon d800 because 36mp’s pure overkill for it’s small sensor. d700 had 12 and was perfect. nokia is saving 5mp images as far i know anyway. still i dont get it, you do lousy little snapshots with your camera, its fun and all, but you will never remotely touch what you can do with a dslr, so why making such a big deal out of it. little toy cam in a phone is nice to have but its the least important thing to worry about since snapshots will look the same, 2mp or 200mp. im 100% certain that even the old 4mp d40 can do better than nokias ugly 38mp monstrosity.
Know what would really speed camera up? A dedicated camera button like on the ION.
I don’t know of any users who don’t want a dedicated camera button, and yet HTC, Samsung, Moto, seem hell bent on not adding one.
I want a camera button too! If not just for making recoveries that much easier. And for custom roms play/pause like on cyanogenmod. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my GNex without that feature when cm comes out :(
BOTH SUCKs!! NO MICRO SD!!!