The Taiwanese EPrice.com.tw website put together a head on head race between a HTC Butterfly and a pre-release version of the Sony Xperia Z.
But before we start, you might not know the specs of the HTC Butterfly, since the phone is available only in Asia. If you are from the US, you may be accustomed to the smartphone that the Butterfly variant was made out of – HTC Droid DNA. Just as a quick way to put you up to speed, here are the HTC Droid DNA and Butterfly variants’ specifications.
- Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 1.5GHz quad core
- 5-inch 1080p (440ppi) Super LCD3
- 2,020mAh battery
- 8 megapixel rear camera with 1080p video capability
- 16 GB internal memory
- 2 GB RAM
- Android 4.1 Jelly Bean
Right now, there are four variants on the market: Droid DNA (US), J Butterfly (Japan), Butterfly X920d (available in Asia) and the Butterfly X920e (marketed only in Rusia and China). Other specs depend on the variant. For example, only the Japanese and the US HTC Droid DNA are LTE capable, and only the Japanese variant has Infrared.
Moving on, here are the specs for the Xperia Z:
- 5-inch, 1080p display
- 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro (the same as the HTC Butterfly)
- 2GB of RAM
- LTE connectivity
- 13-megapixel Exmor RS camera sensor.
- Android 4.1 Jelly Bean
- 2,230 mAh battery
- Water-resistant up to 1 meter (not important in the tests that were made, but it’s a feature that’s worth mentioning)
The EPrice team used severel different benchmarking programs (such as Quadrant, NenaMark, AnTuTu or Vellamo) and in all of the instances, the Xperia Z scored better than the Butterfly (although not by much).
Another test was the video display test. A picture with the two devices side-by-side displaying the same video can be viewed in the gallery bellow. The display test was won by the HTC smartphone.
Camera-wise the phones are equally matched, HTC managing to snap better looking pictures during the daylight, while the Xperia Z taking better-looking pictures during the night (an example of which is in the, you guessed it, the gallery at the bottom of the article).
Finally, pictured bellow is the AnTuTu battery test done by the Russian blog Hi-tech on the Xperia Z:
As you can see, the Xperia Z seems to have a pretty darn good battery life, while the HTC doesn’t even appear next to it.
Overall, the two phones are pretty similar as far as performance goes. Reasons why you should choose one over the other are subjective. Do you prefer the Sense 4+ UI? Would you like your phone to be dust and water proof? Do you prefer HTC over Sony? Is the phone available in your country?
