Googles product

The crowning achievement of Google’s budding social network by far is the ability to communicate with up to nine other people across the world instantly, and for free. Since the arrival of Hangouts,Google+ users have done everything from communicate casually to conduct trans-continental business meetings. There’s no limit to what those nine people can do, or how long they can do it. To make things even better, users can even enter a Hangout from an Android or iOS device, be that a tablet or a phone.

If you are an active Google+ user, you may consider how well your next device performs in a Hangout as a tie breaker when choosing your next gadget. Over the last week, we’ve gathered the top devices across manufacturers, operating systems, and mobile networks and put them all to the test. So, what is the best phone or tablet for a Google+ Hangout?

NEON VS Non-NEON

On paper, most of the hardware required for a Hangout is the same across most of the smartphones capable of joining the Hangout. For the most part, you’d think that the better camera, or the higher quality microphone setup would be the qualities you would look for in terms of what would be best for a Hangout. At the core, what you are really looking for is a chipset that supports hardware acceleration, specifically for video. This architecture type is called NEON. A device with NEON architecture enhances video encoding or decoding, graphics in things like games, and image/speech processing. NEON devices will handle Hangouts much better than non-NEON devices.

If you have an iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S, your device supports the NEON architecture. For Android devices, you’ll need to do some checking to see if it is supported. Using either a file manager on your device, locate a file called /proc/cpuinfo and open it. If you are unable to access this file from your phone, you can download the Android SDK and access the file using the Android Debug Bridge. If you see the word neon on the Features line, then your device supports NEON extensions.

Phones

To measure which device performed the best overall in a Hangout, each device was put through a series of tests. Each device was tested indoors and outdoors in a variety of situations including wind, conversations happening in the background, multiple people addressing the Hangout, and alone in a quiet room. Conversations in the Hangout were also measured for quality consistency. Each of the devices were tested individually, and each of them were tested in as similar a fashion as possible.

This test yielded several interesting results. HTC and Samsung devices of the same generation performed almost identically, with a single exception. The results from the Samsung Galaxy Nexusin a Hangout were wildly varied. In some tests, the results would be great, while in practically identical situations the Galaxy Nexus was nearly unusable. Motorola’s two most recent devices, the Droid 4 and the Droid Razr, also showed a significant variety in results. Despite being the newest in their lineup, the Droid 4 was by far one of the worst performing devices in every situation.

When comparing the iPhone to the Android batch, the iPhone 4S performed well above most of the Android devices, but struggled with noise cancellation in most situations. If there was wind or other people talking, the phone was often unable to handle the distortion and the audio would suffer. The phone that performed best out of the devices tested was the Samsung Galaxy Note. The high resolution of the screen allowed for a very clear and very large image of the other users in the Hangout, while the microphone placements on the device allowed for sound cancellation and external noise suppression.