Nexus 5 - on lollipop, Superb battery life, and the recharge time is pretty fast (not 15 min fast but pretty fast.) Another big factor, is I upgraded form a nexus s4g, familiarity helps in this instance. This samsung is new to me, and I am still learning proper navigation/fine tuning it. I really want to forage into the world of rooting, just in hopes of getting rid of all this crap on here ...
I've been using an iPhone 5 for 2 years now in a LifeProof case. The phone itself has been flawless, and I am VERY hard on phones. My pocket is where a phone goes to die. I frequently work in a dusty (fine abrasive grit, conductive too) environment, I get wet, I cram myself into tight places, my pants are frequently the target of white hot weld slag, you get the picture. The case is starting to show signs of wear finally but thanks to krazy glue, it's going to make it to my 2 year upgrade where I decide if I want to upgrade or not. I like the size of the device, it "one-hands" extremely well but the screen size is just a bit small. The keyboard buttons are a bit too small for flawless txting in the upright position while the screen gets VERY crowded when typing in the sideways position. Literally, you can see about 1.5 lines of txt while typing out a post on FHC. So you would think I would be all about a slightly larger device (bigger screen) with similar features, hello iPhone 6. But I'm admittedly on the fence for my next phone as well. The 6 while bigger, just doesn't have a feel that I like, although that could change with a case. I've only checked out the bare phone. I use too use my phone for social media and FHC plus I take a gazillion pictures/videos and use it for music. I thought a 16GB phone would be fine, WRONG. Just loading up a few albums takes a major bite out of your available memory even tho I dump my pictures to my desktop PC every so often. The fact that Apple does not support a removable SD card for boosting on-board storage capacity is a bummer. I know my next phone will be at LEAST a 32GB machine. I don't know jack about Android these days and my days of wanting to tweak every last setting on a device are pretty much done with. I wanted a device that just does what I wanted, when I wanted, with no hassles and an easy learning curve. So naturally an iOS based device appealed to me. I enjoyed the 1.3 weeks I had with iOS 6 when I bought my phone, then iOS 7 was released, and life was pretty good. I was snapping pics, posting them to FHC and FaceBook with no problems whatsoever, posting away here on FHC, having deep meaningful conversations with Siri, and it was extremely rare that I crashed an app or had any problems at all. Then iOS 8 came out and all hell broke loose. Posting pics to FHC? You're funny! Facebook? Crashed every other time I used it. Siri told me to get a life , and for the first time in nearly two years, I was mad at my iPhone. All in all, it was a very un-Apple-like experience. Things got much better a couple weeks later but Safari STILL (WTH Apple ) does not upload files correctly with our forum software (remember, it worked perfectly in iOS 7) and I am occasionally getting an app freeze-up or crash. Usually Facebook. Google Chrome will upload pics correctly but it's not a flawless experience either with a few minor glitches here and there that are annoying enough that I still use Safari as my primary browser. Also upgrading to iOS 8, my phone does not always connect to my truck properly like it used to. Sometimes I can't use the controls on the truck to change songs, other times it won't display song info, and on occasion, it just drops the USB connection for no reason at all. That seems to have gotten much better with the last software update but I was pretty frustrated for a few weeks while it got sorted out. Will I ditch Apple the next go round? Maybe, maybe not. I still like iOS, when she lets me, I enjoy my wife's iPad Air quite a bit, especially for use here on the forums. But now not even Apple's built in apps like Safari are bug-free and that really, well, bugs me. I'm not a fan of a device that I need to spend hours removing "bloatware" from and I'm not likely to be up for "jailbreaking" or "rooting" my phone either. I don't know if this helps the OP in his decision or not but I figured I'd point out some of my honest frustrations with the iOS platform as of late.
Mastermech, sounds like you need to stop giving money to Tim Cook and get an android. You want a big phone, get the nexus 6 or galaxy note4, or g3. Get another rugged case, stop using iTunes if you use that and enjoy something better than apple products. I'm not an apple product liker. I've used iPhones, iPads, macbooks, and I learned computers in like 1982 on a apple 2c( or was it 2e?). You don't need to root, jailbreak, etc but some do, to do what the phone wouldn't let them do. I find that's a very small portion of real users. Going straight nexus or pure versions removes any bloat and is fast and clean. Some like my moto x are so nearly pure android even with att stuff, that it wasn't worth the price difference to get the pure version. Keep in mind, the bigger the phone, the easier to break, and they don't fit well in pockets.
I found a smoking deal on a Nokia lumia before Christmas for my wife to ditch her flip phone that was hell to text on, and not smart, and well embarrassing. It was $40 out of pocket, own it, no per month crap, and she loves it. It's a nokia 635 windows phone, so its totally foreign for me, but she loves it. Early Christmas present and she is happy = me happy. Fwiw, the best way to post at home for me is on the nexus 7 tablet. But there's other tablets for under $100 that work fine.
Wow lots more of a response to this than I thought Id get I have been looking at the samsung s5 and the note4 very closely I like alot of their features Im also going to check out the motorola moto x that sounds like something Id like. My biggest thing really is battery life to support everything I do on the phone. Some days we have nothing to do at work and Im on the phone all day which means I have to charge it 2-3 times a day. I had one of them a couple years ago theyre to slow and it ended up being just a party trick cause I could put it in a cup of water and leave it there for awhile. Battery life and not being an iphone are very important. I understand lots of people like Apple but Im not one of them Ive never liked them or there products.
I have one of those tablets I like it a lot. I got it free when I upgraded my wifes phone and use it for school and FHC all the time.
I've used iPhones since my first iphone 3 years ago, mainly because I am a creature of habit, and didn't want to learn a new operating system I find iPhones to be pretty easy to use, and generally trouble free. Sometimes they pizz me off, but I'm not very tech-y, so that's probably mostly my fault. Although, I'm not sure what I'll do when I upgraded from my current 5. I do not like the massive things that pass for phones these days. Funny that I like iPhones, because I absolutely HATE using macs
Ok I have a Samsung Galaxy S5 now. I traded in a Moto X. Battery life is better than expected on the S5. I read on Kindle on it and the screen is big enough. The new bigger moto X wasn't out when I got this.
Motorola & Verizon severely handicap the droid OS. I'd avoid this combo. Then again, this was 2+ years ago my experience.
So what do y'all mean by unlocked, rooted/unrooted? I'm not a tech guy I don't get to deep into this stuff as long as it does what I need it do I'm happy with it.
New motorolas are all much more vanilla droid is now. Especially the new moto x, and nexus 6. The droid turbo from Verizon has minimal bloat, but it, like the other Motorola's have the best processor in them so they don't get bogged down. Yeah, my moto atrix was slow to boot, even with a dual core, but it was comparable at the time with the iPhone 4 for speed. But right now one of the easiest ( and probably the cheapest with it being free on vzw) ways to get android lollipop right away is on the Verizon moto x.
Rooted means downloading and running code that lets you install a custom operating system on the phone that was produced by a developer other than the OEM. People do this to get around all the bloatware and mandatory crap the telcos will lock into the stock OS they load, or get to a newer version of the underlying base OS earlier. If you are not at all techy be careful trying to root it, as a screwup can brick the phone.
Unlocked / pure means non contract price. So, you pay for the phone, no carrier involved. You also don't pay per month for the phone. And you can switch carriers easy. Rooting , you'll never need to. Is a techy thing some do. I'd forget that as you shouldn't need to with a current phone, especially if it's on the newest os. Going back to your point about battery life, you'll get a full day easy from a new moto x. Testers were getting 6 hours full on non stop use in attempts to test battery on motox' s when they were all still on KitKat 4.4 os. Lollipop 5.xx is even better on battery use. I'd suggest dropping in at at Verizon store and checking the new moto x out. Check out a few other phones too, but with the deal I saw recently you'd be hard pressed to beat it at any price point.
Im going today to check out some phones and see what I can see. Now one more thing what is bloatware?
This will probably derail the thread - but have you used Lollipop on a tablet yet? Ive got the OTA upgrade to 5.0.1 available on my Nexus 10, but I haven't yet installed it. Everything Ive read is that a lot of tablet users are having bad wifi and performance problems with it and apparently very little adoption so far.
