This all makes it rather odd that I’ve never been that excited about having a phone from Apple. iPhones are clearly great devices, but they just never really grabbed me like all the other Apple products have. There's beens issues with dropping calls, and problems with maps too – not quite the perfection I'm used to with most other apple products.
I must confess at this point that until a few months ago I’d always been a Blackberry user. Although there were some huge problems with them, mainly the lack of a developer ecosystem and app store, I liked the physical keyboard and stuck it out for a while. However, between massive network outages, a bad web browsing experience and the aforementioned collapse of the development ecosystem I found myself needing a change. When my contract came up for renewa l I faced one of the ultimate geek dilemmas – what phone to upgrade to?
After much debate I settled on a Samsung Galaxy S4 (the S5 was not out then). While the iPhone 5S has some fantastic features like Touch ID that nearly made me swing towards it, the S4 has a few things that stole the show.
- Screen size
I adore my iPad, but for something a bit more pocket friendly the S4 is the perfect size. I can read blog posts, surf the web and social networks on it, and am actually happy watching video TV on the screen, which has significantly more real estate the iPhone does. - Camera
The Galaxy S4 has cameras front and back. The back camera is 13 mega pixels, outshining the iPhones 5s’ 8 mega pixels. I often take pictures on the go that are not just for personal use but for posting on websites I run or contribute to, so I really wanted to get as good a one as I possibly could. The same is true of for video - Google run my life
I’m not even going to pretend that this is about jumping over Apple’s walled garden. In fact it's quite the opposite. All my contacts, email, and calendar, are run via Gmail. Being on Android makes syncing up extremely easy, and actually removes an extra step of linking things to iCloud which I would have had to do with an iPhone. - Personalisation
The flexibility that Android devices offer really appealed to me. You can add various news and widgets around your homescreen, have split screens, and really develop your own workflow. - It's made of plastic
The plastic finish of the S4 may not feel quite as nice as the Gorilla Glass iPhone 5S, but it sure as hell isn't gong to smash the first time it gets knocked out of your hand.
Since I've been using the S4 for a couple of months I've been more than happy with it. Browsing and gaming on the larger screen has been a joy, AtBat and YouTube and DailyMotion videos are easy to watch on the screen, and I've taken some pretty decent snaps on the camera. On the software side everything synced up with my Google account, Swiftkey (only now becoming available on iOS) has sped up my typing, and i've moulded the workflow to my every whim. I come to love features on the S4 like multi window, and widgets that allow you to personalise your homescreen. It really is 'my' phone.
The biggest complaint I have is the obvious one – syncing files between Android and MacBook Pro is not as seamless as syncing with an iPhone. However, an app that fixes the problem was just a Google away and, and my UK cellphone network gave me a 50MB of free Dropbox space when I put the phone. It's not quite the friction free joy Steve Jobs envisioned, but it works.
There are countless tech products I'd only consider by the Apple version, but I didn't feel like that about a phone. So long as it doesn't catch on fire, I feel I've made the right choice in opting for an Samsung Galaxy S4.