I currently have an iphone and my contract is up in a few weeks. I desperately want to get an android phone but there appears to be issues with every android phone available. I thought I settled on the G3, but my friends device randomly shuts down almost daily. I've round this is a common issue with the phone. I like the S5 but have seen issues with the charging doors breaking off so the phone is no longer waterproof. The HTC m8 camera supposedly isn't that great but then I keep reading about the lens film having issues. I'm running out of options and I really don't want a new iphone. Should I be concerned about buying an M8? How are the radios in the phone?
It was very much the same for me - I loved my iPhone 5S but the screen size had always been an issue. I first went with the S5, which was terrible. Went through 3 of them, all three having the same slow as molasses UI and tons of lag all over the place. The S5 has a decent camera but as a photographer, I seriously have to ask myself where all the adulation was coming from. Autofocus is fast but not insanely so, image resolution is great, color reproduction is also pretty good, but the software sucks. There are lots of artifacts and distortion because of over-sharpening and noise-reduction algorithms and I never actually liked pictures that weren't taken under the best of conditions. After the 3rd one, I got my money back and chose a Nexus 5 instead. That one I really liked a lot - decent camera (definitely better low-light results than the S5, as long as you shoot in HDR+ mode, not as good in good conditions, though), lightning fast, no-BS OS. The reason why I couldn't hang on to the N5 was battery life: it just never lasted through the day. I ended up selling that one a few weeks ago and got the G3. That one turned out to be the biggest mess of them all - absolutely horrific software problems. The phone shut itself down about 5 times a day (it probably overheats - I don't know), and was even laggier than the S5 - should have known better as the demo unit in the store already lagged a lot, but I figured it was just getting too much abuse. Anyway, the G3 went back within a week.
Completely out of options, I ended up getting the M8, which I had never even considered because of the camera reviews and the fact that 4 mp just aren't enough for me (and yes, I am one of those people who occasionally prints posters from my mobile phone pictures if the phone was the only camera I had along to get that special snapshot). I can honestly tell you that, except for the camera (which produces great results in terms of IQ but doesn't have enough resolution for my taste), the M8 is hands down the best Android phone you can buy at the moment. The build is even better than the iPhone 5S's, it's lightning fast under any condition (which I still can't believe, considering the fact that it has almost exactly the same innards as the S5, which is a laggy mess), the UI is unobtrusive and if you don't like it, you can replace it with Google Launcher (or any other 3rd party launcher) now within a few seconds. HTC concentrated on the features that matter (double-tap to wake etc.) and are useful. Again, the only thing I don't like about it is the camera. It's not bad per se and if you don't print your pictures, it's actually recommendable. The autofocus is the fastest of all the handsets I tested (you might want to turn of face-recognition, though, if you take pictures of more than one person as it seems to focus on the faces it likes best rather than on those you want it to focus on
, color rendition is fabulous, low-light performance is excellent if you choose the correct modes. The only area where it lacks is the resolution - 4 megapixels really aren't enough for today's standards and will limit you in terms of being able to crop and zoom.
Reception-wise it's decent but not great. It seems to be somewhat hesitant to switch to 4G networks if 2.5G (EDGE) offers better reception. That has been the case with every HTC phone I've ever had - I guess HTCs algorithm favors battery life over data speeds. I just wish you could manually tune that. Of the phones I mentioned above, the Nexus 5 had the best reception by far and held on to any 3G or 4G signal it could find, but I'm guessing this was partly why the battery never lasted through the day.
If the camera is what you use most on your phone, you might also want to consider switching to WP8 rather than Android, btw. My wife has the new Lumia 930 (which is the European version of the Icon) and that camera is pretty darn great (albeit with a very slow AF). I also really like the OS - once Flipboard and Feedly have been released on WP8, I might consider that platform for my next phone.