I got a chance last night to play with my friend Beth Matuszek’s iPhone, while she played with my G1. I’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.
It doesn’t. In theory the G1 and iPhone have the same resolution, but the cruel truth is that the G1’s display is superior – stronger luminance contrasts, better colors, generally crisper. It’s not a subtle difference, it really jumped out at both of us.
That’s not the shocking part, though. Beth has a first-generation iPhone that’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? Hello? Apple? You’re supposed to be the world-beaters at this sort of thing; what have you been smoking lately?
UPDATE: Mystery partly and perhaps entirely solved. The physical sizes of the G1 and iPhone display are different. The iPhone’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 — which apparently it isn’t.