Galaxy S3 or iPhone 5?

M

mknlb50

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 2, 2006
Messages
367
I know, I know it's another one of these threads, but I want to listen to the people who have tried BOTH devices!

The first and last smartphone I bought was iPhone 3G, which is still working great! I want something that lasts and wows me like the iPhone did back then.
 
hmmm... i don't own these two devices... but i do have right now an iphone 3gs and a galaxy s2 both is unlocked, jailbreaked and rooted... and if i have to choose which one to upgrade to those two new devices i will quickly choose to upgrade the galaxy s2 to the s3...
 
If you ask the forums, it'll come down to a pissing contest between both fanboys. Phones are personal devices, and should be treated thusly; what works great for someone may not work great for you. My recommendation is to go into an AT&T/Verizon/Sprint store and play with both phones, and get the one that you like. My wife did this, exact same choices, and ended up out of left field with the Galaxy Note 2 (WTFBBQ!!11!). It just goes to show that seeing is not always believing.
 
I agree whole heartedly about a smart phone being a personal device, and the decision to buy one over the other based firmly in an individual's wants and needs. Taking for granted personal preference, I love my GS3 so far. It's a great phone, and very powerful and comfortable for me to use. I got a hard case to buff out the bulk and weight a little bit, and now it's perfect for me personally. Your mileage may vary.
 
just thicker and heavier. The phone weights practically nothing, and is really thin. Plus the case protects against scratches.
 
FrostBite said:
If you ask the forums, it'll come down to a pissing contest between both fanboys. Phones are personal devices, and should be treated thusly; what works great for someone may not work great for you.
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this.


Go mess with them in the store. Maybe read some reviews and make your choice. There is no way that you're ever going to get unbiased info, especially on an enthusiest site.
 
I used the iPhone 4 for 2 years. Then it was time to upgrade to a new phone.

I bought the GS3 and used it every day as I normally use my phone for 2 weeks. Ultimately I ended up returning the GS3 and got an iPhone 5 instead. That being said. I've had the 5 for 3 weeks now and love it.

I just was really not happy with the GS3 nor Android. I really tried to like it but in the end it just had a lot of small things that I did not like that started to add up. Some things I didn't like were because of Android, and some things were because of the GS3 itself.

I think one of the biggest things for me was battery life and battery performance. I can try and break that down.

When I use my phone, I use it with the screen on a lot. The GS3's huge screen is a real battery hog. At the end of each day I found that the screen in the battery stats accounted for 80% of my battery drain. This was even with the screen brightness turned 90% of the way down. This also made it nearly impossible to see outside due to the AMOLED-type screen but I tried to put up with it.

The GS3 battery is larger though so if you do things like stream music and make phone calls (things where the screen is off) the GS3 probably lasts longer than the iPhone 5.

After doing the measurements and seeing the battery stats I found that I could only get about 4-5 hours of screen-on time with the GS3 before completely depleting the battery. With the iPhone 5, i'm seeing around 8 hours of screen-on time which is much, much better for my usage.

Another thing I couldn't figure out about battery drain is with I think reception. Over a night, the GS3 would drain by about 20% doing absolutely nothing. I even did this test with everything but the cell radio tuned off. Looking at the battery stats after an 8 hours night, sure enough, "cell standby" was what took 95% of that 20% drain ovre the night. Now I do only have 1 bar of HSDPA in my apartment so most people would blame that as the cause. This might be true, but I find it unacceptable compared to the iPhone 5.

Performing this same test on my iPhone 5, I only see it drain by 3% over the same 8 hour night with the phone placed in the exact same location and with the iPhone also only getting the same 1 bar of HSDPA.

Now for real world usage for my uses, I absolutely love to have notification services on so that I can contact people and that they can contact me at any time through any means. This is the main purpose of my phone. This means that at all times I like to be signed into and listening to notifications for the following:

Google Sync(gmail, gtalk, calendar), Google voice, Work Exchange(email, calendar), Skype, Steam, AIM, MSN, and Facebook.

I found that on Android, being always signed into these services had quite a large drain on the battery throughout the course of the day. Now either this is a poor design of Android, or poor design from the developers of the services and apps.

On the flip side I have always been able to stay signed into all these services on my iPhone 4 and now my 5 and there is no noticeable battery drain from any of them. I believe this is because they all operate through Apple's push notification services so they all listen for notifications on a single daemon that is very lightweight.

The amount of battery drain is dependent on how many notifications you actually receive and there is no cost to simply remain connected. Unlike Android where there seems to be a large battery cost to simply stay connected to these services whether or not you even receive any notifications.

In the end, I simply found the SG3 could not get me through a single day where as my iPhone 5 does easily with ~40% left at the end of the day and it's doing all the same things my GS3 was doing.


More on the screen. This was my first AMOLED screen (I am used to IPS LCDs) I was really not impressed with the GS3's screen. Sure, it's large and has excellent black levels. But it also failed for me in a couple other ways. First, colors did not look very natural like a calibrated IPS (iPhone 5 screen actually has full SRGB spectrum support) Also the AMOLED was terribly hard to see outdoors. I found i'm able to keep my iPhone's screen much brighter overall because the screen isn't such a large battery drain like the GS3. I am able to usually comfortable see my iPhone 5's screen outdoors.

Another thing really surprised me about the screen. I was expecting a super crisp display with the GS3 being that it is 1280x720 vs the iPhone's lower resolution 1136x640. However, when I had both phones in my hands at the same time and ran some comparisons I found some surprising things.

To compare, I opened a bunch of various websites on both devices. Now I compared reading their smallest text on both devices. With keeping each page completely zoomed out on each device therefor the width of each device ultimately constricting how much of the page I could see, I found that while I could read the smallest text on the iPhone 5 screen, I could NOT on the GS3. Even though the page was being rendered with a width of 720 and the screen was physically larger so the page was slightly larger I could not make out the small text.

I was really surprised by this and the only thing I can come up with as for why this is, is due to the sub-pixel layout of the AMOLED vs the LCD.

This is the iPhone 5's sub pixel layout:
http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/iPhone-5-4-pixels.jpg

And here is the GS3's:
http://www.fortressofsolitude.co.za.../05/Samsung-Galaxy-S3-Event-Pixel-Density.jpg

I could definitely see a screen door effect on the GS3 due to all that black space between the pixels when trying to make out the small text. Also the fact that the 3 color sub-pixels are not the same size or shape or even layout with the alternating red/blue means that small text that would normally be rendered by a single pixel in width is unreadable on the GS3, where it's perfectly readable on the iPhone 5 with the standard LCD sub-pixel layout.

So I figured, what's the point in having a larger higher resolution screen If i have to zoom in on the page content to even read it. The main thing I do on my phone on the go is web surf and it's just a lot better on the iPhone IMO.

Another thing about Android itself is the app marketplace. I'll just touch on this, but I found that many of the big-name games that I'm used to on iOS were nowhere to be found on Google Play or the Amazon marketplace. The few that were also looked terrible on the GS3. Particularly the ones that I tried being Peggle and Plants vs Zombies. On the iPhone, both games are rendered at native resolution with pixel-perfect sharpness. On the GS3, they were slightly stretched (as if they were merely iOS ports from the older iPhone 4 aspect ratio) and the bitmaps were quite fuzzy and it was easily clear they were not being rendered at native resolution.

Also, a thing about apps like games that I noticed is that on iOS when I close a game to do something else like send a text, when I open the game back up, it's as if i never closed it. It resumes in an instant as it was simply frozen in-state when it was minimized. On Android, the games had to reload all their assets every time I switched back to them which took a good 5-10 seconds. I'm sure this is a problem with the app developer and not Android itself, but if this is any indication of how developers plan to treat their Android apps, I don't want any part in it. Maybe Apple has just made it much easier to pause and resume state via the iOS SDK compared to what Google offers in their Android SDK, Who knows.

On build quality. I didn't mind the S3 too much. It felt good in the hand. Though the plastic construction of the S3 does not match or feel as nice as the all glass and aluminum of the iPhone. Also all of the physical buttons on the S3 including home, lock, and volume all felt super cheap. They were all wobbly and felt like they were going to break when I pressed them. Definitely not like the solid metal buttons on the edge of the iPhone 5.

A final strange problem I had with my S3 is that I could never feel the vibration go off in my pocket. I often took out my phone to see that I had missed several notifications that happened awhile ago. I did many tests to see that it was indeed vibrating properly when notifications came and I did have the vibration intensity turned to the max. I can't explain this one but it's probably just me. I do not have any problem feeling when my old iPhone 4 or my new 5 vibrate though.

I hope this story of my experiences helps someone make their decision. It is ultimately up to them what they will like. The S3 and Android is a solid phone and OS despite my problems. But that's what they are, they are MY problems. Not everyone will have these same problems or care about them as much as I did, but they are the reasons that I choose the iPhone 5 over the S3.

I did have Jelly Bean flashed onto my S3, CM10 M2 in particular so I was using the latest and greatest. I wouldn't say that I'm done with Android after only one brief shot. I'm sure I will try it again after my iPhone 5 contract is up. Perhaps Android 5.0 will be out and the Galaxy S5 or Google's latest Nexus phone.
 
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GS3 would get my vote. Especially with the Seidio extended battery capable of NFC.

Love my GS3!
 
The screen whiteness is way better on the iPhone 5... Maybe it's the pentile holding the Samsung back.
 
ocellaris said:
Good write up. I haven't owned a GS3 however that mirrors the experience some friends had. GS3 battery life and performance was disappointing for them in real world use.
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Depends on how you use it. If you need your screen on all day, then yeah it makes sense to get a phone with a smaller screen that doesn't use up as much, or just get a Razr HD Maxx and be done with it.

I usually have anywhere from 30-50% battery left after I get home from school, that is with 4G on all day and it updating weather/FB every 15 minutes.

Honestly though, I wouldn't get the GS3 now. Get the Nexus 4 or the iPhone 5. The GS3 is kind of overrated, I like it but it's not the most amazing device ever.
 
xIronCrossx said:
Depends on how you use it. If you need your screen on all day, then yeah it makes sense to get a phone with a smaller screen that doesn't use up as much, or just get a Razr HD Maxx and be done with it.

I usually have anywhere from 30-50% battery left after I get home from school, that is with 4G on all day and it updating weather/FB every 15 minutes.

Honestly though, I wouldn't get the GS3 now. Get the Nexus 4 or the iPhone 5. The GS3 is kind of overrated, I like it but it's not the most amazing device ever.
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I think their problems with the battery life were more from the poor Android notification system and running a bunch of apps in the background. It isn't too hard for people to tank their battery life by simply running a bunch of apps. Apple handle this much better by not allowing background tasks to use CPU time and forcing everything through a common notification system.
 
The Longphone 5 is too narrow, if you ask me. It just looks and feels weird. ...And then there's the whole 'you have to use iOS' bit of it. I personally can't stand iOS, in terms of both asthetics and workflow, but obviously it can't bother you as much as it does me since you've got an iPhone already.

The Galaxy SIII on the other hand, is a great device in my opinion. But I wouldn't recommend limiting yourself to a dichotomy where it has to either by an iPhone 5 or a Galaxy SIII. Don't forget to look at the Nexus 4, the Nokia Lumia 920, the HTC Windows Phone 8X, and the Samsung ATIV, as these are all high end, technically impressive phones that might offer more to you than either the Longphone 5 or the Galaxy SIII can.
 
Hmm. Nexus 4, looks nice. I like my HTC Vivid 4g but it seems a little lacking at times. Only problem for me is after owning 3 LG phones and them all being junk, I said I would never own a LG phone again.
 
bigdaveberg said:
Hmm. Nexus 4, looks nice. I like my HTC Vivid 4g but it seems a little lacking at times. Only problem for me is after owning 3 LG phones and them all being junk, I said I would never own a LG phone again.
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Except this is a google phone not LG. Its been built to spec for google by LG.
 
bigdaveberg said:
Hmm. Nexus 4, looks nice. I like my HTC Vivid 4g but it seems a little lacking at times. Only problem for me is after owning 3 LG phones and them all being junk, I said I would never own a LG phone again.
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My LG Optimus V has been a great little phone.
 
Neo Zuko said:
The screen whiteness is way better on the iPhone 5... Maybe it's the pentile holding the Samsung back.
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It's probably AMOLED in general. I tried out some GS2s at a store (they're SAMOLED+, real RGB stripe) and they still go green/blue off angle.
 
I am leaning towards S3 but Windows phone 8 has made some nice improvements and restored some missing features from WM 6.5 and I might go that route if I can find one with FM radio....
 
I'm not the type that uses my phone for hours per day, but I love my GS3. The screen size is absolutely perfect, coming from an iPhone-size device (HTC Aria) prior to this. Performance is great, especially using NovaLauncher instead of TouchWiz's. I could never go back to the smaller screen size, even with the iPhone 5's extra vertical length.

To me, this isn't necessarily a difficult decision. The size and form factors of the two devices are different enough that any other distinctions are probably somewhat minor by comparison. Some people claim current-gen Android flagships are too big to use with one hand, but this is absolutely untrue for me, and I don't have the biggest hands either. I think something in the 4.5-5" range, with a ~16:9 aspect ratio, is the ideal smartphone screen size now that we're able to make them so thin and light.
 
Regarding battery drain; if you're finding that regular sync is draining it. Why not switch off those that aren't essential? It's easy to do, there's one menu with all the sync items on it. Additional, if you have weak 3G signal then, at night, why not switch it back to 2G mode? It's just a flick of a switch and you can get shortcuts to it.
Also, now that they have same aspect ratio I can do a quick comparisons; a SGS3 has 44% more screen space than the iPhone 5. It also has a bigger battery but definitely not big enough; should've been Razr Maxx sized.
 
wait a month in november htc is dropping some sweet new phones

Also i have a gs3 and i have used several ios devices and personally i would go with the gs3 i dont like the feel of ios it is hard to say any one bad thing i dont like about it but i just dont like the experience ios delivers...

Now that said i would trade my gs3 for a note 2 in a heart beat...

Wacom digitiser and stylus really thin and large screen though it is a bit large for some...
 
FrostBite said:
If you ask the forums, it'll come down to a pissing contest between both fanboys. Phones are personal devices, and should be treated thusly; what works great for someone may not work great for you. My recommendation is to go into an AT&T/Verizon/Sprint store and play with both phones, and get the one that you like. My wife did this, exact same choices, and ended up out of left field with the Galaxy Note 2 (WTFBBQ!!11!). It just goes to show that seeing is not always believing.
Click to expand...

Sounds like you have a smart wife......maybe too smart for you! ;)

Galaxy note here.....nothing compares......grab the GN2 :)
 
If you're used to iOS you'll definitely want to try out the Galaxy S3 first hand to see if Android is what you're looking for because it doesn't suit everyone.

Android wins in the customizability department without question and the larger S3 screen may be great for you if you're someone that browses the web a lot or watches movies on your phone.

If your primary focus is more on talking, texting, and apps though I'd go with the iPhone 5. The smaller size makes it easier to pocket and Apple has the superior App ecosystem. I like to browse the web a lot from mobile devices myself but I've since passed on upgrading from the Note to a Note II in favor of an iPhone 5 and iPad because even though the Note offers a FAR better web browseing experience than the iPhone the same can be said for the iPad over the Note.

I'd rather have two mobile devices that excel at what they're best at in order to get the best experience rather than one device that does each well but not perfect. For me the Note is just too big to carry everywhere I go for talking and texting and too small for long hours browseing the web and running apps away from the PC.
 
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I would have to say Galaxy Note 2 as well, but I noticed this thread is a comparison of the Iphone5 and the Galaxy S3. :D
 
its just operating system preference at this point. S3 and the iphone 5 are both amazing.

personally i love my iphone 5. its small but still has good real estate screen wise. good resolution, LTE and i really dig all the apps.

i came from a WP7 and I had all androids before that.
 
Can't speak too much about the S3, but I felt like the S3 was a little more of the same from the galaxy nexus which I do have. The screens are essentially the same, the processor a little fast camera a little better. Both have terrible battery life in the short time I used a S3 (3 days) and the 9 months I had my Gnex. But Android has some glaring flaws that I can't stand anymore, mostly the things that have already been mentioned. Where as iOS's flaws are more bearable for me. Its all about which phone has flaws you can live with. None of them are perfect, every single one of them have major problems to some that are minor to others just have to see which one you can live with. I decided personally I couldn't live with Android anymore so I got a iPhone 5 and I am waiting on the Lumia 920 to see which out of the three is the best for me.
 
As a user of the 3GS, 4 and now the iPhone 5, I can solidly recommend getting the S3 or an alternate android/Windows device.

After going from a jailbroken 4 (running 5.1.1) to a pure vanilla iOS 6, I felt so confined. The phone actually felt slower at times because in the jbroken 4, I was able to set animation times faster. On top of that jbroken features allows you to have all the on and off toggles through SBSettings for all common tasks such as BT, Wifi, so forth so forth.

There is a healthy community on XDA right now for the S3, as oppose to the dev community for the iPhone which has now dwindled to one or two teams. Apple just doesn't care and won't care.

In the long run I think you'd be happier with the S3, or go for a LG Nexus 4.
 
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