I currently have an iPhone 4. Before that it was an HTC Desire. I'm pretty much middle of the road when it comes to the phone OS, they both have their perks and flaws.

I can now upgrade. I am on O2 and pay about £35 a month. I'm considering the S3, and giving the iPhone to the GF. The question is, is there that much difference between them, excluding the OS?

It's been 18 months since I last used an android phone, so I don't know how much has changed in terms of the OS and marketplace. Is it still full of cheap/free low quality apps, or has quality control come up, and are there good numbers of apps out there (Before it used to seem that 9/10 apps I heard about were iPhone only, and the android port used to be buggy).

I use my iPhone for emails, facebook (not that much) and most of my apps are either reference tools or games I guess.

Advice welcome.

Quality has gone up on the android apps but on some of the larger apps seem to be lagging slightly behind still (nowhere near as buggy tho) but then on the flip side some apps (Evernote & Instagram are 2 that come to mind) have better Android apps than iOS.

Swings & Roundabouts at this point it seems

Spec wise there is a huge difference but will you make use of it? Prob not.

edit: Nice thing with the S3 is as long as yours comes with Dropbox preinstalled (95% of them except certain ones from the states) you get 48GB of Dropbox for free

Spec wise, I've felt in the past that Android phones generally needed higher specs, with apps being developed for specific phones or just bad programming. It seemed that on the iPhone as the hardware is the same across the board the apps are designed to run more efficiently, or so I thought/felt.

Hmm.

That is very true, a lot more obivous on the order phones (most Android 2.x.x phones were 600mhz) where there wasn't much to play with when programs were optermized.

S3 and HTC one X are both Tegra 3 (Quadcore 1.2-1.6ghz) chipsets which more than enough spare power to make up for any of those issues... that being said I downloaded a random app the other day (can't remember what it was called) that would barely run on my Tegra 2 tab but then it was a unknown app with 2 stars and lots of comments saying the same

I've had great experience with the little brother the Galaxy Ace 2 which is about half as powerful, and that runs satnav and everything very responsively, although admiteddly I hardly tax my phone or leave tons of apps running. But unless an app is really that badly coded I can't see how it could overpower these phones. Also, You will be able to put Ice Cream Sandwich on the S3 if its not on there already, which is supposed to be a very smooth experience indeed.

S3 already has Samsungs version of ICS (touchwiz) on it and from my small experiance playing with workmates phones, the videos online and general information I've read its Samsungs best attempt at it yet. I didn't like the version on the S2, they dumped a lot of google stuff and replaced it with bloat.

I've had my s3 about a month now and have been very pleased. My missus has an ICS S2 and the S3 is much slicker, smoother and user friendly and it has so many little quirks and features that make things easier.

The appstore, or google play as it is now, has moved on alot since the days of the Desire and is much more mature and grown up, Android apps are being developed along side or even before iDevice apps now as they have much more of the market share. Good thing with android is, if there is an app you need but it isn't available then with a bit of time and learning you can make it yourself. I'm currently trying to make an app where I can enter circuit details and test results from a job and export it to my pc.

The battery is epic aswell, I'm glued to my phone most the day and I could probably go 2 nights without charging it and thats with powersaving mode switched off.

It is a huge phone though and that alone might be enough to put some people off.

Well, I've bit the bullet and ordered an upgrade. I had a quick look on the marketplace and it seemed to have a fair bit of stuff I might be interested in. The size is probably good for me, I rarely speak on the phone, and if a larger screen would be more useful for the kinds of things I do with my phone.

Get the Galaxy Nexus.
Always get Nexus devices.  I'm holding to see if there's a Nexus based on the SIII.
Jellybean is the tits

Quote from: DEViANCE on July 25, 2012, 17:46:59 PM
The appstore, or google play as it is now, has moved on alot since the days of the Desire and is much more mature and grown up,

Current Appstore annoys me no end.  Why when I pick "My Apps" do I get a list of the apps that I once installed, and not a list of the ones I've purchased?  Why is there no option to filter out the one's I've purchased?

That change confused me aswell. It used to be very simple to find previously purchased apps and then one day it changed to the new system?! Hopefully they will revert it back or make a filter setting on the next update

Well, picked up the S3 today. Not had too much time to play with it.

First impressions though, are that largely Android is still the same as 18 months ago but tidied up a bit. Not sure on the marketplace, seems a bit too busy.

My main gripe so far is that wireless seems to be a bit buggy or poor. The iPhone had a solid, but weak connection in the flat. The S3 seems to have the same weak connection, but regularly drops the connection with an "authentication error". Bit of a pain when you rely on using wireless to save on data charges.

Another gripe is how pathetic the O2 click and collect system is. There's an O2 shop round the corner. I figured I'd do click and collect as I can't really get things sent to this address. I figured, as the website said so, that you go down with the text reference number, and they give you the phone. Noooooo...after waiting half an hour to be seen, I had to give them the reference number, name, phone number, address, and the card I used to pay for the upgrade. Next time I think I'll just get it sent to my home address, though I am rapidly going off O2 due to it's poor CS.

A few weeks ago I missed a Post Office delivery, went around, ten seconds and they gave me the parcel, no ID required. Was to pick up my I7 3770K CPU so not exactly cheap.

Then I do visit them every few weeks to withdraw money so I think they might just recognise me.

I've always been amazed by the range of security you get. Some places it's almost like you have to give a kidney to buy a pack of crisps, other places you just need to look the clerk in the eye and you're good for a few hundred quid :|

The wifi issue is still bugging me. Given that the access point is 5m away with nothing but a single wall between the phone and it I wouldn't expect to have such a poor signal.

From memory my HTC desire was just as bad

Admittedly it could be an issue with the residential network, but when I was at home the wifi signal wasn't much better. Looking on the internet there are a fair few people with the same kinds of issues