Now that I hear that ATT is pushing the full ICS update to the Vivid, I'm wondering how many of the folks here have updated and what sort of improvements they're experiencing. And if there ARE improvements, especially in smoothness and battery life, I'd love to hear about it!
After reading the review of the One X, it sounds cool, but I'm NOT excited about the lack of microSD slot, non-replaceable battery or how the camera lens will do doubt be scratched to hell over time. I imagine ATT will want at least $200 for the OneX, and meantime, Amazon has the Vivid for ONE CENT!
Am really on the fence between waiting for the Sammy GS2 HD or just getting the standard Skyrocket or Vivid. Many of the comparison reviews between the Skyrocket and Vivid show the Skyrocket ahead by small margins due to the slower clock speed of the processor and poor outdoor viewing of the LCD screen.
Your thoughts?
Outdoors has been fine for me. Display I think goes to the Vivid for a couple of reasons:
1. While the LCD does have grayer blacks than Samsung's AMOLED screens, Samsung's screens tend to tint whites blue. Maybe it's just me, but this has the effect of making colors in other things (images, etc.) seem a bit off as a side product. The blacks on the LCD screens don't do that. AMOLED sort of forces you to use Black themes a lot, to save battery. LCD is backlid so you can use whatever you want. Depending on what type of sAMOLED screen you have, you may or may not have burn-in issues. It's an issue on many Samsung phones. I'm not sure how the latter (or newer ones will) fare with that. I hated the SAMOLED On my Vibrant because of the constant image ghostine when I'd go from one app to another, plus the notification bar burned in so it was always faintly visible in games that I played in landscape on that left side of the screen. Colors are typically over-saturated as well. Some people like it, some people don't.
2. The Skyrocket has a WVGA screen that you can see pixels on. I can't see the pixels on the Vivid's qHD screen. Personally I have no clue why Samsung used a WVGA panel on those phones. Even the Pen-Tile qHD sAMOLED would have been a bit more future proof but WVGA just looks terrible on a screen at 4.3" or higher (I don't even care about 720p on anything < 5"+ personally I think it's unnecessary and taxes the processor/GPU more for not so much benefit in end-use). Personally I think the low screen resolution on those screens pretty much eliminate any advantages they have in color reproduction (though the Vivid produces accurate colors). Viewing angles aren't a big deal for me since I typically give my phone face on, and outdoor visibility of SLCD isn't nearly as bad as TFT LCD screens (think HD2, HD7).
The One X lacking an SD Card Slot was a deal breaker for me. I went with the Vivid since on ICS the One X really doesn't outperform it all that much outside of the better camera - for general use they felt comparable to me. The lack of a removable battery can be an issue if your phone freezes. I have had my iTouch freeze and force me to keep it on until the battery ran out in order to reboot it (no other methods worked). So I can't deal with that :-( Sometimes bad things can happen
So I personally give the Screen to the Vivid. The camera goes to the Vivid by hundreds of miles. SoC differences have negligible impact on usability (especially with ICS on the Vivid). The GS2/Skyrocket does have a higher HSPA+ cap than the Vivid for those in non-LTE markets, but that will only matter if you're hitting the cap on the Vivid otherwise the devices will likely have almost the same data speeds side-by-side.
As a UI layer Sense looks like Mac OS and TouchWiz looks like a DOS shell. I really have been waiting for TouchWiz to get a decent revamp and it seems they are going in the right direction with the Galaxy S3, but TouchWiz up to 4.0 just looks like it was drawn in Microsoft Paint. So many of the user controls just look too dated and some of the stock Apps on TouchWiz just look TERRIBLE, like the stock SMS app and FriendStream vs. Social Hub. Also like the HTC People App better (showing the last Social Update) and HTC has much better Widgets. Sense is more configurable than TouchWiz. That seems odd since Samsung obviously aren't putting much emphasis on their design and materials, so you'd think maybe it's in the software...
Personally, Sense is so much more superior to TouchWiz that I'd buy an HTC phone over a Samsung phone just for that (now that HTC removed that ring from the bottom of the Home Screen, I hated that...), since I don't root or tinker with my phones.
Does the Samsung Media scanner still make your phone unusable for seconds at a time everytime you add or delete something on your phone using a file manager? I wish HTC put a built-in File Manager in SEnse 3.6/ICS, the way Samsung does on their TouchWiz phones, though. I prefer QuickOffice to Polaris. Really have no clue how to use that app since there is just a document on the screen and it doesn't seem like I can even select text in it without zooming in/out in Edit mode every time I try to double tap, nor are there any toolbars on the screen. I might buy QuickOffice and disable Polaris, Lol.