Any Android phone as smooth as iPhone?

[openwheel]

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Now meanwhile, let's look at Hangouts and how long it takes to open, or the damn Tapatalk app. Even Chrome can't really keep up with Safari or FF on Android. There's some pretty bad apps out there.
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I have to disagree with Hangout and Chrome. They are both perfectly smooth on my Nexus 7 FHD.

 

[cronos]

Interesting. Have refused to consider the most heavily skinned and bloated OEMs, i.e. samsung, LG, HTC, sony, but maybe I have to give up and go there.

So were you just making an assumption there and lumping the four together as 'the most heavily skinned and bloated OEMs' based on how they were five years ago? Or have you actually seen how the latest Touchwiz, Sense 7, etc. are on the Galaxy S6, HTC M8/M9, LG G3, and Xperia Z3 (soon to be G4 and Z4)?

I know people really hate Touchwiz and I have no personal experience of it on a phone, so I have no comment on that, but I don't see how people can say that Sense 5, 5.5, and 6 is bloated, and as far as I know Sony starting from the Z series barely has any bloat (or skin) and the experience is very close to stock Android plus its special apps (Walkman, etc.).

 

[Midwayman]

I largely concur with other posts. Set the sight at S800 + 2GB RAM or better. That combo is more pleasant than A7 + 1GB RAM (iPhone 5S, iPad Air) in my experience, and should perform better on a phone unless the ROM is messed up. S800/S801-based phones can be had for ~$300, brand-new, these days.

Honestly the s800 is really the sweet spot. Or maybe a 805 as long as they stick to 1080p. However pretty much any of the s800 phones are great. All the newer stuff seems to have given up any gains to driving 1440p screens.

 

[obidamnkenobi]

So were you just making an assumption there and lumping the four together as 'the most heavily skinned and bloated OEMs' based on how they were five years ago? Or have you actually seen how the latest Touchwiz, Sense 7, etc. are on the Galaxy S6, HTC M8/M9, LG G3, and Xperia Z3 (soon to be G4 and Z4)?

I know people really hate Touchwiz and I have no personal experience of it on a phone, so I have no comment on that, but I don't see how people can say that Sense 5, 5.5, and 6 is bloated, and as far as I know Sony starting from the Z series barely has any bloat (or skin) and the experience is very close to stock Android plus its special apps (Walkman, etc.).

Pretty much. Haven't kept up with phones for a while. It's just boring race for the most ludicrous high DPI screens, worst battery, and silly features. I just remember that the perception was that samsung, HTC, LG and sony have gross, slow and bloated skins. I don't want this BS so I just look at nexus or moto phones. Which is very limiting.

I thought sony was pretty bad. Maybe I'll have to look at it again. Skimmed an S6 review now which mentioned some bloatware, and of course undeletable carrier apps..

 

[Achtung!]

In terms of UI smoothness:

Galaxy S6 = iPhone 6 > HTC One M9 > LG G3 > Sony Xperia Z3 > everything else.

I have a Galaxy S6 Edge and it's virtually lag-free.

 

[soccerballtux]

I tried Android 5.0 when it came out and various UI elements had been screwed up IMO. Furthermore, I noticed delays with the phone app, switching between the 'recently phoned' list and the 'ringing someone' UI.

IMO N5+4.4.4 is perfectly smooth. I enabled ART on it, apps appear pretty much instantly and scrolling the vast majority of the time is smooth. I would only try 5x again if I had to, or if I found out that they had fixed the UI annoyances I had encountered.

yeah. I keep ART off for Xposed but 4.4.4 is where it's at for smoothness.

that said, there are still plenty of poorly-considered and poorly implemented design decisions.

 

[soccerballtux]

Interesting. Have refused to consider the most heavily skinned and bloated OEMs, i.e. samsung, LG, HTC, sony, but maybe I have to give up and go there.

I installed CloudyStock 2.7 and Xposed G2 Tweakbox to remove a lot of the bloat that pollutes the notifications panel. Additionally you can disable the remaining apps like 'music' and whatnot manually.

it only makes financial sense if you go on a cheaper, no contract carrier, because that way you get the cheap phone and the low monthly payment/no phone subsidy payment that you typically are paying with other carriers' higher monthly fee.

it has the thinnest bezel of any phone released to date, and the 5.2" screen is 'significantly larger' than the 4.97" screen on the Nexus 5 that I came from, enabling a 380DPI to actually feel entirely comfortable.

I'm still having a problem with Swype though-- multi-taps that are close together get interpreted as word-swypes/gestures. I believe this is related to the lag/hitching I see when using LinkBubble. I need to figure out how to profile all the processes to see what's doing it. It exists even on the stock ROM. Not sure how to fix.

because of that last problem I'm seriously debating whether to keep the Nexus 5. I think this is still a good purchase though.

 

[soccerballtux]

Honestly the s800 is really the sweet spot. Or maybe a 805 as long as they stick to 1080p. However pretty much any of the s800 phones are great. All the newer stuff seems to have given up any gains to driving 1440p screens.

that's one reason the MotoX 2014 is still on my list of recommended phones. Aside from the small battery, it still has a 1080P screen. Which is why the LG G2 is the perfect phone-- it has a battery.

 

[obidamnkenobi]

that's one reason the MotoX 2014 is still on my list of recommended phones. Aside from the small battery, it still has a 1080P screen. Which is why the LG G2 is the perfect phone-- it has a battery.

So if I where to give up on give up on my 2013 G, a good upgrade would be the 2014 moto X? Is the 2013 X too slow now?
How about these other options:
Oneplus one
Nexus 5 (too old?)

Those two are both ~$250 used. Not too bad. The 14-X is about $100 more. I thought the screen on the one+ was too large, but seems they're all going there anyway.

 

[lopri]

Nexus 5 would be still in my short list if I were to get a 5"-ish phone today.

 

[blankslate]

Now I realize that comparing a $200 phone to a $600+ phone is hardly fair; but my wife's iphone 5S (which is ~ 2 years old) is just so much smoother and faster than either of my android phones ever were, even when new. But I'd like to know if this just from me being to cheap to splurge on fancy hardware, or are android phones just slower? Is the galaxy S full of samsung skin crap actually smooth and fast?

I'm thinking it's mainly the memory difference and perhaps the cpu difference.

I would thinking that the Android stock ui should be as fast or faster than Nova or Apex Launcher, but maybe not

..

 

[gochi123]

xperia z ultra is lagless too

depends on whats runnin like active wallpapers and such

 

[Commodus]

Yeah, I've been trying the S6 Edge recently myself (have one for a couple of weeks), and it's probably the first Samsung phone I've seen in a long while that's consistently smooth. Even the Note 4/Note Edge periodically freaks out in certain user interface events. Of course, I'd hope it would be glass-smooth given the cutting-edge processor and storage, but the lighter software load no doubt helps as well.

 

[soccerballtux]

So if I where to give up on give up on my 2013 G, a good upgrade would be the 2014 moto X? Is the 2013 X too slow now?
How about these other options:
Oneplus one
Nexus 5 (too old?)

Those two are both ~$250 used. Not too bad. The 14-X is about $100 more. I thought the screen on the one+ was too large, but seems they're all going there anyway.

well, it's a dual core processor only and at 1.6 or 1.8ghz; and based on my hotplugging-with-quad-core-experience, having the 3rd core turn on occasionally (it's only needed about 10% of the time that the first core is) significantly impacts general-phone-smoothness (tested by disabling 2 cores all of the time), and having the cores at 2.4ghz vs 1.7/1.9ghz also makes a significant difference. This was back using Intellidemand governor on Faux123's kernel for the Nexus 5.

Also, the 14-x is quad core and has a 5.2" screen. Ever since day 1 of the Nexus 5 it felt a little too small. The extra real estate with 5.2" is incredible-- I can run 380 DPI and it feels just as good and roomy as 445 DPI (what I used on the Nexus 5), even though it's significantly more dense.

The 1+1 has software bugs like typical CyanogenMod, and is bad enough that combined with country-of-India licensing agreements that they're not happy with, they're rolling their own in-house Android version now.

Basically any phone with 3000maH battery, 5.2" screen or larger, and 1080p (NOT 2K) is what I'm personally interested in. I think 5.7" for screen is the perfect phone size because it's larger than 5.2" (which is still a bit small for comfortable ditching of PC use and 'useful/close enough to a tablet that you won't want a tablet' IMO. Note, this is only if you increase the phone DPI setting in build.prop, otherwise the larger screen goes to waste/you won't gain efficiency without displaying more content. I'm still tempted to swap to a larger screen. note this was after resisting larger phones like the plague-- I had an Atrix 4g (4.3"), then the Galaxy S2 Epic 4g Touch (4.5"), then the Nexus 5 (4.95"), and now the LG G2). It wasn't till the G2 that I started realizing something even larger would be nice-- and I would get one larger-- IF there were any phones with as thin of a bezel between the screen and the side of the phone as the LG G2. But, even the G3's 5.5" has a wider bezel (wtf?) between the screen and side of phone (not sure what they were thinking there). So anyways, basically what happens is every time I hang out with my friends who have a 6+, I really really want a[n iPhone?] larger screen.

So my next phone upgrade list consists of the Note 3, or the ZTE ZMAX is a $100 monstrosity (720p screen and only an A7 processor but it's 5.7" and has 2GB of RAM). I've tried the 6" Nexus 6 and other 6" phones but those truly are too large to use one handed. Even on the Note 3 I can comfortably hold the back of the phone with my 4 fingers and reach the thumb up to the status bar-- but this simply isn't possible on the Nexus 6, and doing that -is- a necessity for use or dialing someone while cooking, etc.

 

[zCypher]

Depends what you're doing. All phones can lag, think about it, they really are just small computers. So you have to take in to account all of the same things you would on a computer. What hardware, firmware and software is in use, the resources utilized at any given moment, the tasks being performed, etc.

I had the S2, Note, S4 and now the OnePlus. ALL of them lagged. The OnePlus now that I installed OxygenOS Lollipop is by far the fastest and smoothest, but even the Note had very good hardware at the time, the issue was the version of Android at the time + the Touchwiz UI that was horribly unoptimized.

Before the Lollipop upgrade on the OnePlus, many things were smooth, others lagged a lot. Hangouts lagged a lot for sure. Now on Lollipop, Hangouts is buttery smooth with very little exceptions. Much faster.

Take control of what's happening on your device. Root it, remove unnecessary clutter, use something like App Ops to control what permissions apps are actually using (you'll discover in the process that many apps are using things like Location even when you "disabled' it from the regular menu, accessing the camera when you're not using the app, etc - these things all use precious resources and battery).

If you're using a phone that has a laggy overlay like Samsung's Touchwiz, look for a good custom ROM such as Cyanogenmod or Paranoid Android, XDA is a good source for that stuff.

And finally, don't use the lowest end devices. The flagship devices are always going to be faster. Flagship Android devices perform similarly to the Apple offerings. Until now, Apple has always had faster camera performance than any Android phones, but maybe they finally bridged the gap there, not sure.

 

[KingGheedora]

I largely concur with other posts. Set the sight at S800 + 2GB RAM or better. That combo is more pleasant than A7 + 1GB RAM (iPhone 5S, iPad Air) in my experience, and should perform better on a phone unless the ROM is messed up. S800/S801-based phones can be had for ~$300, brand-new, these days.

What are some phones that have S800 / 2GB (or better)?

 

[soccerballtux]

What are some phones that have S800 / 2GB (or better)?

http://www.google.com

 

[bonkers325]

Get an LG G2. It's $200 at Best Buy right now. GSM unlocked too so you can use it on Tmobile or ATT (you might have to install custom rom though).

Or wait for the Asus Zenfone 2. Around $300 for the top end model.

BTW I use an iPhone 5S and miss Android, even if it is a bit laggier.