Geez, the fanboy rhetoric has to dig deeper and deeper these days.
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a Nexus 5. Gorgeous screen, perfect size, fast, and surprisingly inexpensive.
Did you just fail at reading comprehension?
Well, Iāve been an Apple fanboy since time immemorial, but I did get a Nexus 7 when they first came out, just to see if they were indeed all that the Android lovers said they would be. I thought, at least Iāll have something really portable to take to coffee shops to read Kindle stuff on.
You know what I ended up using it for? It sits by the chair in front of my TV, and I use it to look up info on the programs that Iām watching and on the games that Iām playing (when I get stuck). I got an iPad Air when they came out, and Iāve never looked backāin fact, I ended up reading all of A Song of Ice and Fire on it.
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Iāve always found the Samsung stuff a little bloaty. I change phones every few years when HTC gets one right, and Iāve got a Nexus 10 and thatās slick as.
Iāll definitely consider HTC next. Hopefully something waterproof.
Because I have a custom Google Play Edition ROM on my S3 Iāve been staring helplessly at the OTA update notification to 4.4 for months now. 
Still worth it.
My N7 with Paranoid Android and OTA updates makes me very, very jealous.
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Thatās a good example. And trust me itās even more confusing with a dual sim phone. And a lot of other small things like this. And the gaudy colors, icons, the sounds, omg the sounds.
There is one Samsung ringtone found on most of their phones that seems to be the less irritating, and I hear that very often. I have asked people about it (I work in retail, so I hear a lot of phones ringing), and they said the same thing: itās the least painful to listen to.
I think that people realise that Samsung is crap, but they donāt care (as in they have more important stuff going on, like their lives, you know), it does what they need it for, and they donāt know that it could work better until theyāve tried something else.
Most people I know who use Samsung couldnāt care less about the device itself, they just need their apps, email, social networks and camera. Samsung is what they bump into first when they walk into a store, they know Samsung, thatās what they buy and I canāt blame them. I think theyāre the victims of Samsung.
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Iāve owned two Samsung Android phones. The first was the original Nexus. It was great. Vanilla Android, worked well, fast, etc. A few OS updates later I decided I wanted more juice and that Iād buy myself a Galaxy S4. Oh boy did I regret that decision fast. Samsung have created an appalling version of Android. Bloated, glitchy, ever so battery hungry and KitKat just never seemed to get releasedā¦ what extra features do you get for that?
Well I suppose the camera feature that uses both front and back cameras to let you include a postage stamp selfie on whatever youāre shooting is fun for about 30 seconds.
The Moto F3 was great for what it was: a near-disposable unitasker phone phone. Very cheap too, as it was designed for third world markets (how often do you see that?).No calendar, snake game, calculator or anything else.
It was also perfectly in-hand-sized, superlight, iphone 6 thin in the pocket and the e-ink screen was easy to see in sunlight and meant absurdly long battery life. Not kindle-style āweeks and weeksā, but days and days for sure. SMS was laughably bad though as the screen could only show five or six characters at a time in a Casio VL-Tone font with no lowercase and barely any punctuation. Even contact names had to scroll if they had the gall to contain seven or more letters.
All in all, a good object it was. I lost something when I finally couldnāt do without a 21st century charge-everyday phone that actually does stuff, and switched to the iPhone 4S Iām using now.
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Yup. A beautiful cinematic widescreen form factor means a ridiculous thin vertical mode. Better letterboxed videos than being horrible for reading.
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Iāve never found rooting to take several hours, at least not with Samsung/Sony/LG phones (HTC can be different) Cyanogenmod has a one-click installer for many handsets. http://beta.download.cyanogenmod.org/install
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You should consider this - It has revolutionised my long-in-the-tooth S3 - http://beta.download.cyanogenmod.org/install
Jared Letoās ābulgeā has been getting a lot of internet attention lately.
I want a Desire Z with a modern processor so very, very badlyā¦
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I just bought one of these in black. ~Ā£150, waterproof, shockproof, quad core w/gfx processor as well, and most importantly, it has pew-pew laser ringtones and makes every call seem like Important Space-Marine Business. Damn thingās heavy though.
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This is begging for Windows Phone, just for Cortana.
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Yep. Went down that path a while back. I havenāt found a Cyanogen mod ROM Iām completely happy with (still got some stability issues, etc) but its a damned sight better than the piece of crap Samsung TouchWizā¦
Pretty much everything I own ends up running Cyanogenmod at some point very soon after acquisition, so the bloat or not from the OEM ROM machts nichts. Iād buy more Nexus and Google Edition devices with barebones Android if more were available. I hate provider bloat in all forms.
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Just get the iPhone. Youāre going to anyway. As a member of the New Media Community, your fingers start burning whenever they touch a computing device that doesnāt have a fruit logo and youāll be shunned by the rest of the pack if you donāt. 
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I too see no way of a galaxy note being a better choice than the identically huge iPhone for someone who already chose to buy iOS apps and is happy with them. The ease of syncing stuff from an older iPhone is a very handy evil genius lock-in feature as well.
One thing to consider is that iPad apps can be quite different from iPhone ones, better designed to use the large screen than just scaling everything up. This makes it a not identical comparison in my view.
