moogly pwns the iPhone!?!
<p>I got a chance last night to play with my friend Beth Matuszek&#8217;s iPhone, while she played with my G1.  I&#8217;ve been blogging that I think the G1 is serious competition for the iPhone,  but I must say I expected the iPhone to look better than the G1 when Beth and I did side-to-side testing of parallel functions, like browsing the Instapundit blog page.</p>
<p>It doesn&#8217;t. In theory the G1 and iPhone have the same resolution, but the cruel truth is that the G1&#8217;s display is superior &#8211; stronger luminance contrasts, better colors, generally crisper.  It&#8217;s not a subtle difference, it really jumped out at both of us.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s not the shocking part, though. Beth has a first-generation iPhone that&#8217;s about a year old; some of the above differences might be simple phosphor decay.  The shocking part is that Android does font rasterization and anti-aliasing better.  The difference is really noticeable on small fonts; compared to the G1 the iPhone has an obtrusive case of jaggies.  Hello?  <em>Hello?</em> Apple?  You&#8217;re supposed to be the world-beaters at this sort of thing; what have you been smoking lately?</p>
<p>UPDATE: Mystery partly and perhaps entirely solved.  The physical sizes of the G1 and iPhone display are different.  The iPhone&#8217;s is substantially larger, which means it has lower DPI. At the same font size in millimeters, therefore, the edges of a font glyph on the iPhone are doomed to look grainier unless the antialiasing is really dramatically better &#8212; which apparently it isn&#8217;t.</p>
