SnapDragon CorePlayer play-off: HTC HD2 vs Acer neoTouch
November 4th, 2009 | 
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Solopalmari has pitted the HTC HD2 against its only other Snapdragon competition, the Acer neoTouch, which is around half the price.
The famous Matrix trailer at VGA resolution was played at maximum speed without dropped frames and devices that were freshly hard reset, and the result may surprise you.
Suffice to say however both devices will give your more than adequate performance even with unaccelerated video.
Check out the video above to find out the outcome of the test.
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Well the HD2 isnt that much slower (and nicely over 200%), but one has to wonder why its slower in the first place. We know the acer is rather basic, it could just be a lighter ROM. Could it also be faster RAM or a better SD interface?
I dont think its down to drivers, the gap isnt big enough.
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Lennard Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
it could be the fact the Touch HD2 has a bigger screen to push out. but really I dont' think that's the cause. in the video you will see that even though both were played at the same time, the Acer's video started first. Yes, it could be faster RAM (which I don't think since the Acer is cheaper than the HD2), the Acer could of had a better SD card with a higher class rating meaning more speed. and yes, it could be a need for driver tweaking on the HD2's side.
looking the results screens, I can see that the neoTouch actually got more data throughput than the HD2.
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nuke1 Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
'it could be the fact the Touch HD2 has a bigger screen to push out.'
At the end of the day, both screens have 800×480 resolution so same pixels, just that it's stretched out over a bigger screen.
However, more power could be consumed in maintaining that huge, bright screen and hence less going towards the processor/GPU grunt, but that's unlikely the case.
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Lennard Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
yeah that's what I was saying: I don't think the screen size has anything to do with it.
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Since there's no TV-out, it doesn't really make sense to put higher resolution/bandwidth videos on HD2. Moreover, judging by the results, even HD videos of moderate bandwidth (3-4 Mbps) won't have much problem playing.
So at long last there's absolutely nothing to worry about in video playback (after all the headache with kaiser and HD)
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Lennard Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
that's why I really want this phone. my phone died and I refuse to buy another one until this one comes to the states, which ever carier it falls to, I will be going there.
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This seems inevitable, the HD2 has this thing called sense all the time!
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nuke1 Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
My thoughts exactly. Some of the GPU's processes will inevitably go towards running that, imo.
The greater problem lies with MS, who hasn't changed WM's instruction set to run at optimum speeds with the latest ARM processors.
The Snapdragon could be churning out more, with same battery usage, if MS got its act together.
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l3v5y Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Well, since the graphics drivers and the snapdragon related drivers are all OEM, that part is nothing to do with MS.
WM is a very multiplatform OS, so forcing requirements like the later ARM cores on OEMs would limit its OEM takeup. OEMs can also choose to enable things like FPU (as far as I can tell) and rebuild the OS with different things enabled (from the BSP/OAK) so it's not entirely MSs fault there either.
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nuke1 Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
In fact, as Rad said in an earlier post, WM is optimised to run with the ancient ARMv4 processor. Which is way over 5 years old.
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Lennard Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
wasn't that for 6.1? we're in 6.5 now. and winMo7 isn't even out yet so how do you know they haven't updated the core?
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rad Reply:
November 6th, 2009 at 10:05 am
It has to do with the underlying OS– 6.5 still uses WinCE 5.2.x, which targets ARMv5 (chips like XScale) and can't make use of any architectural changes since. That's not going to change until CE 7, which WM7 might use. Under the hood, 6.5 has a few tweaks beyond 6.1, but otherwise it's largely the same (main changes are the UI reskin + touch gestures).
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mighty Reply:
November 5th, 2009 at 5:15 am
Sense is there, but I can't understand why it should affect video playback performance. It's running, so it uses a lot of RAM, but HD2 has almost 1.5 times the RAM in neoTouch, so that couldn't be much of a problem. As for the CPU, well, sense isn't doing anything in the background is it? I assume the CPU is taken away from sense and given to coreplayer the moment you open coreplayer (like desktop windows and most other OSs) If sense is really using the CPU doing some background work, it means some of the battery is also always getting eaten at a slow pace…
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I read through the site and saw nothing mentioned about testing conditions. where the videos ran from device or SD card? what tweaks were set in coreplayer? is it the same version on both devices? coreplayer disables OS bitmap cache by default and this degrades OS performance, was this re-enabled? where there any other applications running: did the reviewer stop end all the applications from the task manager, and disabled touchFlo?
I beleive if someone is going to do a review they should do it properly. I hate it when the results are out but there's no way to tell if there were any added conditions that scewed the results one way or the other.
also Admin, I dont' see where on the site it said both devices were freshly hard reset. there were no mention of testing conditions.
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Christopher Hippolyte Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Does it matter??
Although I agree with you that they should have described the testing better, I 'm more interested in real life testing than "lab" testing. In day to day practice, how many people are going to disable TF3D or Acer's GUI every time they watch a movie? And with that said, I'd prefer they leave the GUIs on, since that is part of the out of the box experience.
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Lennard Reply:
November 5th, 2009 at 3:00 am
ok, but I never said that they should disable touchflo or anything, I wanted to know if they did or not. the conditions of that the test was done under. testing conditions are very important because the reader will know exactly what went on in the test.
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I know which screen i'd rather watch a film on. I don't know if it's the lighting or the angle but the acer doesn't seem to do blacks very well.
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Lennard Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
I would definitely go for the Touch HD2 over the neoTouch any day of the week
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l3v5y Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
HD2 is also much bigger!
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if you like to waste/burn money, that is your problem! HD2 costs almost twice as much!
but i like to save money and have better performance. haha (acer S200).
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Foamy Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
The neoTouch is like buying a top of the range PC but then installing windows 98 and using a 15 year old CRT on it. The HD2 may cost more but the extra quality and specs mean you can get so much more out of it. the neoTouch is such a massive waste of a snapdragon.
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netboy Reply:
November 5th, 2009 at 3:59 am
if neotouch is windows 98 and 15 years old crt, then so is HD2! both are using wm6.5 and 800×480 screen! duh!
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mighty Reply:
November 5th, 2009 at 5:04 am
capacitive screen, superior build quality, HTC sense (not bare 6.5 like neoTouch), innovative design(minimal bezal) and it doesn't get scratched everywhere, 70 seconds after unboxing!!
you just won't agree will you ? :p
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finally a benchmark that's actually worthy of watching. Like someone said, the Sense UI probably occupy most of the CPU/GPU duties whereas we know the neotouch has a static, barebone UI (unless it's using Titanium). All things considered, still a very good benchmark but lacks the conditions of which these two phones are set up.
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"the extra quality and specs mean you can get so much more out of it."
what for example?
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Chris Reply:
November 5th, 2009 at 7:28 am
Any form of life span for a start. Acer are well known for cheapness. They often break within a few months but they claim its due to damage and not covered by warranty.
Ive used a neotouch for a few minutes and it was nasty. Its got the softest screen ive ever used. Its like a marshmallow.
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John Reply:
November 5th, 2009 at 8:28 am
It was not that far off. Is there even optimize drivers for the HD2? How far was it off? Not much!!!
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If it is driver related im sure XDA-devs will find out and port them over.
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it is not driver related but hardware related "(
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but to manage hardware you need good drivers…. Which is maybe not the case for the HD2
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It is driver related, the HD2 has only got the Microsoft reference drivers. Its the Tytn II all over again.
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