After 20 days of way to dedicated effort I returned my Samsung Galaxy S3 and turned my iPhone 4s back on. What an amazing relief. Why did I switch after being an IPhone owner since week 1? Who knows, need for a change, really cool ads for the S3? Bigger is better? New is better?
The biggest thing I learned. When it's all said and done, the Apple system is the easiest and best system you can use. The iPhone and IOS6 is almost impossible to move away from if you are a Mac user. Everything links and syncs seamlessly. Calendar, reminders, contacts, bookmarks, email, text messages and pictures. This is the stuff we live by. I was able to get some of this covered with apps like Smooth Sync for iCloud calendar and contacts. About $3.00 each. You can do photo uploads with Google+.
Size Matters! Smaller is better. You know that commercial where a thumb is tapping around the iPhone screen? Pay attention boys and girls. I am about 6 ft tall and have big hands, and I have to say the S3 is too big for one handed use. If you want a mini tablet, it's too small but it's a phone. When it's much harder to call, and really hard to text, forget it. You almost have to use both hands to do things that you can easily do with a thumb on the iPhone. And I can't imagine how one can use the Samsung Galaxy note 1 or 2 as a phone. Waaayy to big!!
Confusion: Android gives the user a lot of flexibility. The widgets for various apps are cool to start with vs. the boringly structured, inflexible, apple interface. But guess what. when it's all said and done the widgets take up a lot of space and if you have a lot of apps, you have to do too much page flipping to get to the ones you want. I found myself eliminating lots of cool widgets and going back to icons that wound up looking a lot like, you guessed it, the iPhone.
I found many of the apps I took for granted on the iPhone weren't quite right on Android. I went through 4 email clients; Samsung mail, k9, Aqua mail, and another I can't recall and all had some issues. Couldn't reliably connect to an Exchange account, would be slow to get mail. (You know where you have an email on your iPad but can't get it to show up on the phone. or you delete a bunch of emails on the S3 and they are still on your computer?
I never found an app on the Android that had more features than it's iPhone counterpart. But I found a lot that were missing features or just didn't work on Android.
So when it was all said and done. I wasted a lot of time trying to make the switch work for me, but foggeddaboutit! Not worth it. Maybe if you don't care about everything syncing and you have hands like an orangutan it will be a wonderful choice.
A final note. When I got the S3 AT&T had a 30 day return policy. When I took it back they said, oh we changed it to 14 days. So if you switch. Don't sell your iphone till you are sure, and make up your mind in less than 2 weeks.
