Going from a S3 to a Nexus5, what will I miss?

Jake

Supreme [H]ardness
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So, over the weekend someone dropped my phone and ended up breaking the screen on my S3. I'm not wanting to subsidize a new phone by extending my Sprint contract, so I ended up ordering a Nexus 5 right from Google Play.

I know the Nexus series of phones are stock Google, but what are the big changes/differences from the S3 running TouchWiz?

There is no SMS only messaging app on the Nexus right? It is Hangouts that does SMS?
 
You shouldn't miss anything and it should be a pretty significant improvement in every category, hah.

Pretty sure there's still a stock messaging app even though Hangouts does SMS. Hangouts isn't the default SMS app and you have to "opt-in" when you open it to enable it, so it shouldn't be the only SMS app available on the phone. I'm still using Handscent though and can recommend that if you need to use a separate SMS app.
 
Handouts does SMS just fine. But I don't remember seeing any other SMS apps on the phone out of box. The only thing you might miss is not having a better picture quality unless you stick to HDR+, battery life is worse, but not having TouchWiz lag would be a huge improvement.
 
I'll check out Handcent if anything is lacking.
So the camera is meh or the camera app is meh?

hmm, I figured batteries were getting better, but I guess more processor and screen will suck that advantage dry.
 
I would think the N5 would get considerably better battery life over the S3, considering it's on much new, more efficient hardware and the battery is larger on the N5 (2300 mAh vs 2100 mAh). I know the camera isn't the best on the N5 too, but from what I've seen, it's more than adequate, and I would still think it's better than the GS3.

I'm wondering if Chang3d was thinking about the GS4 when he said that.
 
I recalled people saying the Nexus 5 having a slightly worse battery life than the S3 and... Phone Arena (Samsung biased) agrees to a huge extent, while GSM Arena agrees to a lesser extent. Now I know Google has upgraded the firmware that supposedly helped with battery life, but I haven't seen too many battery benchmark revisions. Google is not the best optimizer for battery life, and it's been that case for a while.
 
Camera has always been meh on the Nexus line, except the Galaxy Nexus, which actually had a pretty good camera for only being 5MP.

What will you miss? The SD card. That's about it. The phone is an upgrade in all other aspects.
 
The big changes from Touchwiz? Everything is 1000000000000x better. That's about it. My brother has an S3 and I wanted to gouge my eyes out on the few occasions I've used it.
 
Apart from the screen and getting used to Google stock apps over Samsung apps, probably not much else.
 
Never used the SD card on my S3, the 16GB was enough for my pictures and a few short videos. To compensate for that feature missing I did order the 32GB Nexus5.

Hmm I didn't mind TouchWiz, got used to it's quirks.

After some searching I see people were bitching about the camera draining the battery. That solved yet.
 
FWIW, I switched from a CyanogenMod GS3 to a stock Nexus 5. It's much faster than the GS3 was, and I get better battery life.


The biggest thing you'll miss are those annoying drips. And you really shouldn't miss them.
 
Never used the SD card on my S3, the 16GB was enough for my pictures and a few short videos. To compensate for that feature missing I did order the 32GB Nexus5.

Hmm I didn't mind TouchWiz, got used to it's quirks.

After some searching I see people were bitching about the camera draining the battery. That solved yet.
yeah, that camera battery drain bug got solved first by Microsoft (skype). I dunno why Google couldn't test out their sdk before releasing it... But it's solved now.
 
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The big changes from Touchwiz? Everything is 1000000000000x better. That's about it. My brother has an S3 and I wanted to gouge my eyes out on the few occasions I've used it.

100% agree!!!!!!! lets go shout it from the rooftops :) LOL
 
You'll miss the eye stay feature that keeps the display from timing out when you're watching a video or reading an article. So archaic and annoying to have to touch the screen to keep it awake.
 
You'll miss the eye stay feature that keeps the display from timing out when you're watching a video or reading an article. So archaic and annoying to have to touch the screen to keep it awake.

I keep my screen timeout at 2 mins, so that was never an issue with me. I turned all that crap off on my Note 2, esp. the "smart rotate" or whatever it was called, because it caused the phone to be very slow at rotating the screen (since it had to turn on the camera and determine if I was rotated with it). I have a habit of turning my display off every time I sit my phone down too, so it doesn't affect battery when I'm not using it.
 
I have mine set to 2 minute timeout as a standard but the screen still times out under normal use. Only an issue when I swap to the CM11 Note II when the stock Note 3 is charging. Going back to stock Touchwiz when Kit Kat is released for Verizon Note II.
 
So all my previous phones have been Sprint, and incidentally I missed out that this unlocked phone needs a SIM err UICC card. /doh off to the Sprint store at lunch time.

I'll say the phone was delivered before I even got a tracking #.

Hangouts is the default SMS app, there is no other messaging app on the device.
 
Biggest thing I miss so far: the widget Samsung had to stop rotation.
 
You'll miss the eye stay feature that keeps the display from timing out when you're watching a video or reading an article. So archaic and annoying to have to touch the screen to keep it awake.

s3 does not have that is s4 and up also does not work that well


Uhh i like the menu of tw vs stock better got over that then am now getting used to that again... went from a s3 with hellfire 4.4.2 asop to a note 3 with hyperdrive 8 on it tw 4.4.2 also for the longest time my s3 was faster running tw based roms than cm based around kit kat is when the cm roms ran faster...
 
the camera is the biggest thing I'd miss. the S3 had / has an awesome camera IMO, the video was great too.

As far as going from TW to vanilla android, you'll probably miss the contact manager, dialer, messaging app if you used the default one(I used textra), Alarm clock widget was nice too.
 
Personally I think both TouchWiz and AOSP suck. ANY Android phone REQUIRES a custom ROM to be good, in my opinion. Some of them are "decent" out of box, but no better. I would take AOSP over TW, though. As for texting... TextSecure.
 
Most custom ROMs are garbage because they either break things that normally work or introduce more problems than whatever little optimization they try to make. If you have a fairly recent phone within the last two years you're better off with stock ROM. Select custom ROMs, like Cyanogenmod due to a more thorough development and QA process, only make sense on older phones.
 
Most custom ROMs are garbage because they either break things that normally work or introduce more problems than whatever little optimization they try to make. If you have a fairly recent phone within the last two years you're better off with stock ROM. Select custom ROMs, like Cyanogenmod due to a more thorough development and QA process, only make sense on older phones.

I agree that it's extremely frustrating when a ROM developer thinks it's okay to release an untested ROM for a device he might not even own (I've seen people try ROMs from devs without the phone only to - obviously - brick their devices). I've had so many custom ROMs break essential features like GPS and BlueTooth. ROM developers tend to think that they are gods for being willing to put in some amount of effort, but if they aren't testing these features and are releasing ROMs with tons of features broken without warning users (or at least labeling their rom an "alpha") then they're just harming the community and the users of these phones. All those specific devs do is waste the time of people who could instead be spending time using ROMs from competent developers.

Cyanogenmod is stable for some phones, but it's absolute garbage on others. But that's also true of Paranoid Android, SlimBean/SlimKat, and anything else that you can find on multiple devices.

But that doesn't change the fact that no stock Android experience, AOSP or otherwise, is very good. I personally think it's still worth finding the right custom ROM. If not for custom ROMs, I probably wouldn't like Android much. And I've put custom ROMs on some friends phones and had them love the phone a lot more.

I've got an LG G2 and a bunch of custom ROM devs decided to release bastardizations of JB and KK. Most of them still are doing LG's JB sources modded with some AOSP KK stuff to release ROMs that BREAK EVERYTHING AND ARE COMPLETELY USELESS. And yet people are actually trying these pieces of crap. If these devs would just discontinue those stupid versions and work solely on getting real Kitkat based on LG Kitkat, we might get some ROMs that aren't complete s***. Fortunately at least one dev has been intelligent enough to realize this (thanks, dr87, you rock).
 
But that doesn't change the fact that no stock Android experience, AOSP or otherwise, is very good. I personally think it's still worth finding the right custom ROM. If not for custom ROMs, I probably wouldn't like Android much. And I've put custom ROMs on some friends phones and had them love the phone a lot more.

That's why I use stock Android on steroids, aka Xposed Framework + GravityBox. No ROM'ing involved.
 
the camera is the biggest thing I'd miss. the S3 had / has an awesome camera IMO, the video was great too.

As far as going from TW to vanilla android, you'll probably miss the contact manager, dialer, messaging app if you used the default one(I used textra), Alarm clock widget was nice too.

Agree completely, and this from a user who's using both the S3 and N5 (different carriers) right now. The swappable battery, ringtone and general volume loudness, audio clarity, and exchangeable SD card are benefits to the S3.

In my book the S3 was one of the great smartphones. It still compares favorably to today's models.
 
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