I recently turned my Samsung Vibrant over to my wife and bought a HTC G2. I'm on T-Mobile. I've had the G2 long enough to begin making some comparisons between the two. I already have a long review of the Samsung Vibrant based on six months of experience with it, so here I will focus on how the Vibrant and G2 differ. I will add to this as thoughts occur to me.
Look and feel, build quality
The Samsung Vibrant is a much better looking phone than the G2. It is slim, light, and has a beautiful display. If I wanted something that would impress sophisticated design-conscious friends who wear black turtlenecks, have eyeglasses with unusual rims, spend their days in coffee shops sipping espressos and flipping through design magazines, and their evenings in darkened cocktail lounges that play trance, ambient techno, and dub, I would go with the Vibrant. Seriously, it is a lovely phone. I barely noticed it in my pocket.
By contrast, the G2 is a chunky brick. A very functional brick that I really like using, but let's face it, it isn't beautiful. If you are out on a date and desperately trying to prove to your companion that you are not a geek, do not under any circumstances whip out a G2.
Of course as you probably know, the G2 does have a very nice flip out keyboard, whereas the Vibrant relies on screen input. I actually don't use the keyboard on the G2 very often. When I do, it is quite nice.
+1 to the Vibrant for look and feel, and build quality.
GPS
Hands down, GPS on the HTC G2 beats the Samsung Vibrant. At least the Vibrant that I had. As I discuss at length in my review of the Vibrant, its GPS was flaky, even after an OTA update that came out last fall that improved things slightly. Even after the update, the GPS took an inordinate amount of time to lock, and sometimes crashed the app or the whole phone while trying to lock. Even after a lock, the positioning was flaky, so route maps recorded by apps like Cardiotrainer showed me teleporting and passing through buildings.
By contrast, the GPS on the G2 seems to work well. Most importantly, it locks quickly. Once it has a lock, it seems to keep it. Routes recorded by Cardiotrainer and other apps all look like they should.
+1 to G2 for its GPS.
User interface
The G2 user interface is much truer to the basic Android experience. The Vibrant had a number of 'enhancements' which in most cases detracted from the usability of the phone.
The most annoying of the deviations on the Vibrant is that there did not seem to be any way to specify which sets of Gmail contacts to display in the contact manager. It simply displayed everyone in "My Contacts" which included everyone that Gmail added willy-nilly to my contact list based on the fact that we had one email exchange. I had to go in regularly and clean out "My Contacts" in Gmail to keep my contact list manageable.
By contrast, the G2 allows me to specify which groups of contacts to display, just like on the G1. I specify a group I have created called Contacts that only includes people I have added manually.
Similarly, and importantly, the Calendar on the G2 seems to be the basic Google Calendar, not the badly tweaked Calendar app on the Vibrant. The annoying thing about the Calendar app on the Vibrant was that by default, it added events to something called "My Calendar" which had nothing to do with my Google calendar. Events I added on the phone didn't show up on my Google calendar. It was only when I figured out that I had to manually specify with the creation of each event that it should go to my Google calendar that events added on my phone showed up on my Google Calendar.
The one tweak in the Vibrant interface that I liked was that it had a set of easily accessible tabs on the main page, maybe a widget, that allowed direct access to Wifi and Bluetooth settings. That made it easy to turn Wifi and Bluetooth on and off. The G2 doesn't have that. Initially it required me to go into Settings, but I ended up finding and installing some simple apps that are nothing more than shortcuts to the relevant settings pages.
Overall, +1 to G2 for User Interface
Battery life
I haven't noticed an appreciable difference in battery yet, comparing the Vibrant where I manually killed off apps, and the G2 which runs Froyo and doesn't seem to require an app killer. I found the Vibrant battery could drain quickly unless I manually killed certain apps immediately after I was done using them. Facebook seemed to be the worst offender. With the G2, battery life seems OK without my having to kill any apps.
Camera
My impression is that the Vibrant actually has a slightly better camera than the G2. The best of my shots with the Vibrant were comparable with what I might get with a low-end point and shoot in terms of sharpness, color, and clarity. So far I don't think any of the shots I have taken with the G2 have turned out as well as I would have liked, at least on close inspection. At least not the ones I have taken indoors, or in low light. They looked fine on the phone, but when I looked at them after uploading to the web, none of them were too inspiring. Also the G2 has a flash which really doesn't seem to do very much good. I will need to take more pictures to make up my mind for sure. I did take some outdoor pictures today with the G2, in bright sunlight, and they looked OK, so maybe I am being too harsh.
The Samsung Vibrant camera application seemed a bit more feature rich than the one on the G2. I still haven't figured out how to zoom with the G2. On the Vibrant, I used the rocker switch for the volume to zoom.
Update (2/26/2011): The more I use the G2 camera, the more convinced I am that it is just as good as the one on the Vibrant. I have been using it to take pictures on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks before or at dawn during my morning runs, and while walking around LA in the evening, and I have been pleased at how well it has done in very low light. The colors generally seem nice and rich.
VOIP via Wifi
The G2 allows for connecting to the T-Mobile network via Wifi, presumably via built-in VOIP. This is a huge plus. Parts of my house, including the living room, are a T-Mobile dead zone, and I couldn't make or receive calls in those parts of the house. I dabbled with VOIP via Sipdroid, a SIP number from Gizmo, and Google Voice forwarding to the SIP number, but the results were not very pretty. When I brought the G2 back home, I was pleased to see that I had the option of accessing the T-Mobile network via Wifi. I activated that and now I can make and receive calls in my living room and all the other dead zones in the house.
+1 to the G2 for access to the T-Mobile network via Wifi
Network Connectivity
For the last few weeks, my Vibrant had been acting bizarrely in the sense that when I was leaving a Wifi area, it was no longer connecting back to the T-Mobile 3G network. In other words, if I had the phone connected to WiFi, more and more often, when I left the WiFi area, I lost the WiFi as expected, but the phone was no longer reconnecting to the T-Mobile data network. On those occasions, I had to turn the phone off and back on to rejoin the T-Mobile data network. This problem only emerged in the last month or so. There was a related problem with the Vibrant in that in the last month or so, it was less and less successful at reconnecting to WiFi networks automatically when it came within range. Increasingly, when I came home in the evening, I had to turn the WiFi off and then back on before the Vibrant would reconnect to the home network.
A related problem is that the Samsung Vibrant had real problems connecting to certain WiFi networks, including the one at work, and quite often at other locations at well. At work they finally had to program my phone's MAC address into the system to guarantee access. The G2 has had no such problems.
Of course, another nice thing about the G2 is that it can make use of the T-Mobile HSPA network, which here in LA seems pretty complete. This is a huge improvement over 3G in terms of speed.
+1 to the G2 for connectivity in general.
Streaming audio over Bluetooth
One area where the Vibrant wins out is that it was much more robust about streaming audio over Bluetooth, I think via A2DP. I have stereo audio Bluetooth receivers hooked up to the receivers in my living room and bedroom, and never had any problem with the Vibrant streaming music from Orb, Pandora, and Mog to these receivers.
For whatever reason, the G2 has a lot more problems streaming audio via Bluetooth. It especially has problems with the Belkin stereo Bluetooth receiver hooked up to the receiver in my living room. Somehow after a few seconds of music, it actually interferes with the Wifi connection, and the phone loses its Wifi connection completely and the streaming stops. It sometimes resumes, but not always. Basically in the living room, where I need to rely on Wifi, the G2 is useless for streaming music to the stereo. Oddly, the G2 streams fine to my Rocketfish Bluetooth headset that I like to wear when running, at least when it isn't 320 kbps music. It gets choppy streaming high quality audio. It also streams fine to a Motorola DC800 Bluetooth receiver hooked up to the stereo in the bedroom. So maybe it is some kind of interaction between the Belkin and the G2.
+1 to the Vibrant for streaming audio via Bluetooth
Android
The Vibrant is still running 2.1. While there seem to be noises about updating to Froyo, 2.2, I'll believe it when I see it. The G2 runs 2.2 out of the box. I guess the main obvious difference is that on G2, I can watch Flash videos and animations that didn't show up on the Vibrant, which was running 2.1.
+1 to the G2 for running Froyo
Stability and robustness
I think the G2 wins here. Leaving aside the problems with the GPS on the Vibrant, the G2 seems more stable in general. Several apps that seem to work fine on the G2 never worked properly for me on the Vibrant, for example, Google Reader. The web browser on the Vibrant also seemed to lock up frequently, requiring me to pop the battery and restart the phone. Go figure.
+1 to the G2 for stability and robustness
Boot time
One of the frustrations of the Samsung Vibrant was that it took forever to boot. After I turned it on, it was often one or two minutes before it was usable. It seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time scanning the SD card and internal memory, during which time the phone was essentially unusable. Even when it was done with that, it still seemed to be sluggish and unresponsive for some time. The whole experience left me feeling like I was booting an old virus-ridden Windows XP machine.
By contrast, the HTC G2 is usable within a few seconds of being turned on. It seems to not need the media scan. Go figure.
+1 to the G2 for booting quickly.
This is it for the time being. I will come back and edit as I notice other differences.
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