I can't express in words how envious I am of HTC ONE owners right now. I'm committed to Verizon for a variety of reasons (LTE coverage and grandfathered unlimited data and 25% discount through my company to name a few). Please Big Red get off your corpulent corporate asses, ditch the DNA and offer the ONE, I beg you!
I'm still rocking a HTC TBolt and my wife has a Razr Maxx HD which she loves. I'm long overdue to ditch the TBolt and I'm prepared to pay the $699 retail for the ONE to keep my unlimited data if they'd just OFFER the effing thing!
I'm on vacation and hit my local Best Buy today to buy something else I needed but since I had nothing better to do I spent 2 hours in their phone department. It was amazing how easy it was to disperse sales people who kept trying to "help me" by simply asking if I could buy an HTC ONE and use it on Verizon. I might as well have been wearing a garlic necklace at a vampire convention.
My point in posting is I finally got a chance to do a side by side comparison of the Samsung S4 and the HTC ONE for myself.
I basically did everything I could with both phones within the strictures of using Best Buy's internal wifi signal and how far I could stretch the anti-theft tether without pulling the entire display unit out of the floor.
I freely admit I'm no expert but I have been using Android Smartphones for a while and I know my way around the OS and both UI's. So rather than base my opinions on whatever both the display items had been screwed into by people playing around with them I immediately got into the Settings on both and tried to get them at least back to default.
Then I started to play with them from the perspective of what I would use them for most.
This post is already too long. Suffice it to say. Both cameras are excellent in the lighting environment of their store and the limited range I could shoot from. Both seem to have above average wifi signal ability so I'm going to take a leap of faith here and assume both have very good antenna reception and internal radios.
The front speakers of the ONE are greatness personified. The S4 had really good speaker volume but it just didn't compare when I cranked up Pandora on both side by side.
The ONE's display wins, hands down, period.
The S4 costs more retail.
Being used to Sense on a daily basis it was easy for me to find and adjust settings on the ONE to tailor it to my needs and the store's environment.
TouchWiz has a ton of crap I'll never use (or I'll hit the Play Store and get an app or three to add to Sense to do it better) and it took me a long time to wade through it all to find the settings I was looking for.
The ONE felt so good in my hand and reflects the build quality I've come to expect from HTC. The S4 felt bulkier and more slippery (yeah I hit the end of the tether and dropped it once, oops).
Both these phones were AT&T units so they were both loaded with THEIR useless junk. Any Verizon version will be loaded with THEIR useless junk. That's a wash for me.
I like the S4's removable battery and SD card architecture but it's not a deal breaker for me. I have AC/DC chargers at home, at work, DC car charger and a 10,000 Mamp battery pack I keep in the car for portable charging of my BlueTooth headset, phone, Nexus10, etc. as needed, plus a USB OTG cable to connect thumb drives to things for external storage so extending the ONE's battery range and data storage don't concern me in the least.
I have no illusions that this post will influence anyone's buying decision especially if you already have a brand loyalty. These are just my personal observations and, again, my intense jealousy that there are a lot of folks out there enjoying their ONE while I suffer the interminable wait while Verizon's crack team of code monkeys work on cobbling together their inimitable pile of feces designed to bloat the ONE to distraction before they offer it to their long suffering customers.
I'm still rocking a HTC TBolt and my wife has a Razr Maxx HD which she loves. I'm long overdue to ditch the TBolt and I'm prepared to pay the $699 retail for the ONE to keep my unlimited data if they'd just OFFER the effing thing!
I'm on vacation and hit my local Best Buy today to buy something else I needed but since I had nothing better to do I spent 2 hours in their phone department. It was amazing how easy it was to disperse sales people who kept trying to "help me" by simply asking if I could buy an HTC ONE and use it on Verizon. I might as well have been wearing a garlic necklace at a vampire convention.
My point in posting is I finally got a chance to do a side by side comparison of the Samsung S4 and the HTC ONE for myself.
I basically did everything I could with both phones within the strictures of using Best Buy's internal wifi signal and how far I could stretch the anti-theft tether without pulling the entire display unit out of the floor.
I freely admit I'm no expert but I have been using Android Smartphones for a while and I know my way around the OS and both UI's. So rather than base my opinions on whatever both the display items had been screwed into by people playing around with them I immediately got into the Settings on both and tried to get them at least back to default.
Then I started to play with them from the perspective of what I would use them for most.
This post is already too long. Suffice it to say. Both cameras are excellent in the lighting environment of their store and the limited range I could shoot from. Both seem to have above average wifi signal ability so I'm going to take a leap of faith here and assume both have very good antenna reception and internal radios.
The front speakers of the ONE are greatness personified. The S4 had really good speaker volume but it just didn't compare when I cranked up Pandora on both side by side.
The ONE's display wins, hands down, period.
The S4 costs more retail.
Being used to Sense on a daily basis it was easy for me to find and adjust settings on the ONE to tailor it to my needs and the store's environment.
TouchWiz has a ton of crap I'll never use (or I'll hit the Play Store and get an app or three to add to Sense to do it better) and it took me a long time to wade through it all to find the settings I was looking for.
The ONE felt so good in my hand and reflects the build quality I've come to expect from HTC. The S4 felt bulkier and more slippery (yeah I hit the end of the tether and dropped it once, oops).
Both these phones were AT&T units so they were both loaded with THEIR useless junk. Any Verizon version will be loaded with THEIR useless junk. That's a wash for me.
I like the S4's removable battery and SD card architecture but it's not a deal breaker for me. I have AC/DC chargers at home, at work, DC car charger and a 10,000 Mamp battery pack I keep in the car for portable charging of my BlueTooth headset, phone, Nexus10, etc. as needed, plus a USB OTG cable to connect thumb drives to things for external storage so extending the ONE's battery range and data storage don't concern me in the least.
I have no illusions that this post will influence anyone's buying decision especially if you already have a brand loyalty. These are just my personal observations and, again, my intense jealousy that there are a lot of folks out there enjoying their ONE while I suffer the interminable wait while Verizon's crack team of code monkeys work on cobbling together their inimitable pile of feces designed to bloat the ONE to distraction before they offer it to their long suffering customers.
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