So I succumbed to the ads and I sold my old phone to buy the Samsung Galaxy S4. Let me share to you my story. (Skip to the end for TL;DR if you're lazy).
When I first got it, I was impressed by the features and the speed. It played my favorite Android games at max settings nicely and such. But three days later I discovered the ugly.
First of all, the plastic material used to make the phone feels horrible in my hand. It feels cheap, like the new kind of plastic manufacturers use for children's toys.
TouchWiz is terrible. It LAGS all the time and I regularly have minute-long freezes. My apps keep crashing to the point of absolute frustration.
The Air Gestures are finicky. The "look away to pause a video" worked initially and was kind of cool, but then it started crashing the entire phone. The thing where you scroll without touching the screen is erratic and keeps making my current position jumps up and down. It also murders my battery life.
S-Voice sucks too. It just doesn't give me the answers I want and has worse voice recognition than both Siri and Google Now. AllShare doesn't work even though my TV is one of Samsung's newest models that supports it.
The Pentile display looks REALLY bad when viewing high resolution photos I take with the camera. And speaking of the camera, the photos have worse lighting and color than my brother's 3-year old iPhone 4 he bought on launch date. The megapixel count on the S4 is really nice but it's pointless if all the photos I take suck.
I called Samsung and after battling with their customer service for hours, I was finally able to get a replacement. (I figured there was probably something wrong with my phone since other people didn't have the problems I have.) The package arrived and nothing changed. In fact, I accidentally dropped the phone onto my table when setting it down from 3 inches off the ground, and the plastic back cracked.
I sent back the phone and battled Samsung's terrible customer service again. I figured third time's a charm, and I got my third replacement back yesterday. And after three hours of having owned the phone, the friggin thing won't even turn on. I tried replacing the battery and everything, and Samsung's customer service told me to charge it overnight. And it didn't work, and I sent it back for once and for all.
Here I am today, spewing out my frustrations to the Verge forums. Samsung's phone is plastic JUNK, with CRAPPY software and HORRIBLE customer service while being promoted by Samsung's heavy advertising and likely astroturfing I see online. And I feel frustrated when I see my brother's 3-year old iPhone 4, my dad's HTC One, and my cousin's (who works at Motorola) Moto X being enjoyed while I'm just sitting here frustrated with the constant issues the Galaxy S4 has plagued me with.
TL;DR: STAY AWAY FROM SAMSUNG. DO NOT buy any of their phones (or at least the Galaxy S4, I haven't tried their others). Stay with Apple, HTC, Motorola, or Nokia. At least their phones work properly, with amazing build quality, working software, and REAL customer service. It shames me to see such a corrupt company insulting and stereotyping iPhone users in their ads and hiring students to bash HTC, even though those companies try much harder to provide quality products and services to customers, just to convince them to use such a cruddy device. I'm never buying Samsung phones again, and I figure their tablets are the same, if not worse.
I'm not trying to troll or anything. I'm just a tech geek trying to give an honest opinion about my experience with the Samsung Galaxy S4. Yes, I know, this post will spawn a flame war in the comments below. But what's most important is that people know what I know.
#endrage
Source : The Verge
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