Monday 26 May 2014

Why I switched from Samsung



My first android device was Samsung Galaxy Ace. Which was quite nice until I got to know that it won’t receive upgrades past Gingerbread. So, I bought a Galaxy SII. SII was an amazing phone. A great bump in performance and screen size for me after Galaxy Ace. Also SII had the sweet Ice Cream Sandwich. It also got updated to Jelly Bean (4.1.2). Then I made the switch to Galaxy SIII. Which at the time of my purchase still had the same software 4.1.2. Now, it didn’t feel like a huge upgrade in terms of how my phone looked. Except a couple of add-ons the software was similar. Then a 4.2.2 was leaked around the same time when Google released 4.3 and I updated to it, hoping it would bring some fresh change but it wasn’t much. And it had bugs too. I waited for the bugs to be fixed but then Samsung announced that they are skipping 4.2.2 for SIII and will directly update it to 4.3. I was kind of sad but it was good to know that it was getting updated to 4.3. Though when the actual update came out, this was around the time Google announced KitKat, it was again filled with bugs. Now, that wasn’t a leak that was the official update from Samsung and then they stopped the update temporarily to fix the bugs. They released one more 4.3 update after addressing those bugs from previous one but this one had more. And those never got addressed. Then Samsung announced that the international version of SIII, the one I had, will not receive upgrade to Android 4.4 as 1 GB RAM is not enough to run Samsung customizations smoothly. But the versions with 2GB RAM will receive the updates. Some people appreciated Samsung for actually working on to release an upgrade for a device that was out of the conventional upgrade period. But those people need to evaluate the facts that SIII was the company’s most successful phone. Also when you see the timeline of when the updates were released you realise that every update was released almost around 6 months of announcement from Google.
 

After being fed up with their update system I made the switch to Nexus 5. Even though I haven’t received any major updates, the vanilla android experience itself has been pretty great. And when I compared it to a GS5 running 4.4, I was even more happy. The time to time lag on S5 when switching between apps or the app opening speed or the lag when opening the recent app menu, they all just make me a little bit happier that I am not a Samsung customer anymore.
 

3 comments:

  1. Samsung is full of bloatware. That's the main reason I love the Nexus line, no bloat.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice choice! I was an iPhone user for years. I would wait for the jailbreak and then tweak the phone to actually work the way I wanted. Then I went to the HTC One and kept a Google rom on it until I realized just go to the source. I'm perfectly at home with my stock (rooted just for xposed mods) N5 and I think I'm a lifer.

    ReplyDelete