Samsung Galaxy S3 or iPhone5? (no bashing please)

[tomato]

Well, where is it?!! We want photos, the unboxing video, a couple of reviews and a book report while you're at it! j/k

So when are you going to pick it up? (I'm living my Android phone upgrades vicariously through others :P )

[DevilGirl]

Originally Posted by tomato

Well, where is it?!! We want photos, the unboxing video, a couple of reviews and a book report while you're at it! j/k

So when are you going to pick it up? (I'm living my Android phone upgrades vicariously through others :P )

I picked up the Galaxy S3 on Sunday. I was holding off on a review until I've had enough time to truely evaluate it. The first few days the battery ran down quickly, but then again, I was also setting everything up, searching for new apps, etc, during those days. Once I get everything set, I can do a better evaluation of everything as it would be under "normal" use at that point.

So far, other than me constantly using it and running the battery down, I really like it. It's similar yet different from Apple. Enough of a difference, I think, to have made it worth the switch.

I did have a few issues with the pre-installed text messenger app not responding and shutting down, but I think it might have been overloaded due to the ability of having loaded all my messages from the iPhone (over 15,000) via Samsung Kies (similar to iTunes but a bit more limited). I downloaded a different messenger app and it appears to be working fine for that aspect.

I was a little miffed at no visual voicemail in the pre-installed "phone" app. But there were apps I found that would remedy that situation. Some which converted the voicemail into text, while others that allowed for the voicemail to be delivered and reviewed similar to email, where you can pick and choose which voicemail to listen to.

I am a little disappointed that there are not as many options for settings (limited things you can change the settings on). I kept reading up on saving battery life, and all the posts I read (including ones for AT&T versions of the phone) kept stating that you can change the "screen profile" under the display settings. I have yet to find this setting anywhere on my phone.

Oh, here's a tidbit that was rather annoying. Somehow a few of my contacts were transferred onto the sim card (I havn't used a sim for contacts since I started syncing with my gmail account contacts). There was no option for choosing what location to read the contacts from (sim card, phone memory, or synced account), so I tried to deleted the ones on the sim so that I wouldn't have duplicate entries in my contacts list. It would not delete the contacts, no matter what way I tried to delete them from the phone itself. I had to use Samsung Kies and delete them, and they were finally gone.

The notifications are annoying in that even if I open the app that created the notification (primarily facebook), and view what the notification came from, it doesn't clear it from the notifications section at the top of the phone, you have to manually clear the notifications.



I know it seems like I am really nitpicking the phone, and am not satisfied with it at all. This is not the case. Those are the things I'm disappointed by, but it by no means is truely indicative of how I feel about it. I'm loving the 4G speeds. Hubby was extremely impressed by how quickly an app downloaded. And thankfully we do have 4G coverage at home, and pretty much every where I've been so far. The phone is lightweight (lighter than the iPhone4), nice size screen, and overall seems really good.