First of all a big Hello ! wow sorry not posted in yonks been very busy with my photography work lately and my blogging did drop so sorry about that. However I have got plenty to update you geeks with so make sure you stay tuned !
So today I am going to be comparing the Iphone 5 with the Galaxy S3.
Now I have always been an ultimate Apple fan ever since I got my iphone 3G years ago, i loved it and continued to upgrade to everything Apple announced and released. I love how all my Apple devices work flawlessly with each other too.
Recently other smart phones have upped there game and when the galaxy S3 was announced it looked amazing and so did the specs. I must of gone in to stores twice a week playing on the device wondering if its time to test another smart phone out (knowing full well i would still not sell my iPhone)
Back in november I nearly bought the S3 but again changed my mind just thought I would get bored of it, well last week I was truly becoming bored with the ios on my iphone 5, it just lacks customisation and fun ! and I wanted to change things, themes, widgets and play around. I thought lets go for it! lets go test out the Galaxy S3 properly! After bringing it home I quickly set up my google account and added my necessity apps to the device such as Facebook, twitter, instargam , sky news, and flickr. I then added my mail (mac address) and yeah that took some google research to get the settings right.
Once I had some of my fave apps on there i could start using it properly and determine if the S3 was as cool as its made out to be!
First impressions
The lovely large screen for viewing videos was a pleasure to look at, but that comes with disadvantages too, when the handset is in portrait mode and held in one hand its very hard to navigate now some peeps may have long thumbs and easily reach the four corners of the handsets screen no problems but me with my mini thumbs struggled and I loved how I can navigate my iphone 5 one handed.
Also within seconds of playing on the handset the quality of the screen is nothing compared to the iphone5's retina display, the iphone5 is brighter crisper and just flawless when viewing simple text or quality photos and video, so as much as the S3 was fun to play with the screen quality did let it down and I kept looking back at my crisp iphone 5 screen quality.
OS
Now I'm not a lover of android, I much prefer ios I just wish apple would improve there Ios and customise it, however the last time I had an adroid handset was about 6 years ago so I have to admit the android jelly bean was a smooth os to navigate. The apps store or play store as they call it is full of apps and I could match nearly all the apps on my iPhone on the S3 and it was nice to see things much cheaper or free, but thats not a major biggy for me everyones here to make money you cant call app developers for putting a price on things, would you work for free?
Battery
The battery on many smart phones these days is poor and most probably will need charging daily, the iphone 5 is no exception, its battery is poor and even more so on the iphone 5. I was quite impressed with the S3 battery it was played on a lot within the first few days and stored a decent percentage by the end of the night still.
Quality
The roundness of the back of the S3 makes it so snug in your palm, where as the iphone 5 is square and rather thick compared the the s3, I don't know about you lot but I still prefer the iphone 3g and 3gs curved back design and wish apple will change the shape in the near future.
The S3 feels cheap and plasticky in your hand where as the word Quality just shouts out when holding an iphone imo, I just love the build quality and materials used to make apple products they just look flawless!
The S3 is unbelievably light! you would think with the size of the handset it would be quite heavy but nope its not.
Camera
The camera was pretty impressive and although it has a 8mp same as the iphone 5 the overall picture quality is poorer due to the colour and no retina display.
Now being a BIG instagram user I downloaded some apps I customise my pics with on my iphone 5 and installed them on the S3, now on my iphone 5 I usually use 2 or sometimes 3 different editing apps before posting my image to instragram and it still holds its same crisp quality. Now on the S3 I only used one editing app to add text to a picture and then posted it to instragram from the S3 and the quality was awful! now this is probably a software fault maybe the app or possibly android I dont know but that alone was the biggest put off for me, I love my instagram posting and want my pictures to stay good quality no matter what editing process they may go through. So bare this in mind instagrammers!
Sync with Mac
Being a Apple device user my concern was how hard it would be to transfer my data over to the S3 from my iMac, but it wasn't as bad as I thought, I used the Android file transfer software and you just drag and drop your media in to the relevant folders, still not as easy and as smooth as an itunes sync though.
Final Verdict
Within less than 24 hours I knew this phone was not living up to my expectations and I was itching to get using my iphone 5 again...which I am! I returned the Galaxy S3 and will remember this experience for some time!
If you are an Apple user and feeling a bit lost in the basic ios then please keep all of the above in mind before taking the plunge because you may regret it.
If you have a 4s or higher then I don't think the S3 will really impress you and you will miss your Apple device, but then again I know people who have gone from iphone to s3 and LOVED it so each to there own I suppose.
If you think about it Apple are being very sensible! everyone was wondering why on earth the iphone 5 was taller but not wider and thats because you can navigate it so easy with one hand still, so although the shape may not be to everyones taste it is a sensible design!
Also Im constantly moaning about the basic ios lately but thats because Apple want there product to sell to a larger range of ages! my 22 month old daughter can work it and as done for ages! I know a gentleman who is in his 80's and loves his iphone and imac and how they all work together flawlessly. So Apple are sticking to a simple layout to meet the needs of more customers. Lets just hope a few new tweaks to ios will appear in the near future just to keep up with more complex operating systems!
Im super excited to hear about up and coming products and software from Apple at this years WWDC in June, theres even rumours that Apple are possibly working on a watch too.
Well I hope my review was helpful and if you have any questions please leave a comment.
