Oh. My. God.

The difference in user experience is astronomical. I work in the tech industry and I train users on how to use my company's software, and I could not for the life of me wrap my mind around some of the most basic aspects of the phone. Most functions, from scrolling and animations to simple things like changing the focus from a text box on the web page to the URL bar of the browser, had noticeable lag. Sometimes the lag was so atrocious that I could not be sure if my taps worked. Occasionally I would get impatient and tap again, and it would register two taps simultaneously and treat it as a double-tap! You are absolutely right that it felt like using a regular computer - and old and slow one. I couldn't deal with it.

At one point I was checking my work email and had to access a voicemail that arrived as an attachment. I clicked it, and instead of playing the voicemail right away (which the iPhone does), the S4 downloaded it as a file. Okay, fine, I get it, you want to pretend you're a computer. But where the hell did it go? Is there a separate browser area for downloaded items like in Chrome? Is there a desktop, or some kind of folder? And if you're pretending to be a computer, am I going to need special software to be able to open this file? Are you really going to make me open another tab and Google "how to find downloaded files on Android"?!? WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME THINK? WHY ARE SIMPLE THINGS NOT OBVIOUS LIKE THEY ARE ON IOS?

In my experience, people are drawn to Android don't care much about user experience and instead want larger screens and tons of features. Personally, I view my smartphone the way I view my car: I want one that is easy to drive, responsive and won't lag for ~2 seconds every time I do something.

Coming from Android, I have exactly the same response when moving to iOS. 'Why is there no back button? Why is all the functionality shoehorned into one button? Oh, you have to press the button for certain amounts of time for different features? Where's the discoverability?".

You seem to be complaining much more about unfamiliarity with workflow than real issues.

In my experience, people are drawn to Android don't care much about user experience and instead want larger screens and tons of features.

Did you honestly just say that a larger screen doesn't have anything to do with the user experience?

An initial report by Steve Kovach of BusinessInsider proclaimed "Samsung Made $1.43 Billion More In Profit Than Apple Last Quarter, " before the site realized that it was comparing Apple's after tax net income to Samsung Electronics pre-tax operational income.

The site subsequently corrected its story with a new, less racy headline "How Samsung's Profit Compares To Apple's

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/27/samsung-has-not-de...

An earlier version of this said Samsung made more profit last quarter, but it was comparing Samsung's operating profit to Apple's. We apologize for the error.

http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-made-more-profit-than...

OOPS! :)

Most functions, from scrolling and animations to simple things like changing the focus from a text box on the web page to the URL bar of the browser, had noticeable lag.

So I just tried this now and saw no lag. It's not that I don't believe you, but I'm surprised that the Nexus 4 can demonstrate good UI response but the S4 can't (even with all the junk that Samsung puts on top of Android)

I don't see lag as an issue but I agree that there are lots of UI inconsistencies still in Android that make it not as easy to use as an iPhone.

On the other hand - good god is inter-app sharing/integration so useful and efficient. Apple's kinda dropping the ball on that one.

In my experience, people are drawn to Android don't care much about user experience and instead want larger screens and tons of features

Or maybe they, you know, what to actually make their phone do stuff for them beyond what the manufacturer thought they may require.

There's a lot of good stuff on both sides. Dismissing one side condescendingly like that doesn't move the discussion forward.

1. Competition is good! Don't act like there should be only one good option, or you might end up with just that.

2. I really don't like apple as a company, but the iphone seems to be pretty good. It's form factor is a bit better than my S3, and it's noticeably smoother. On the other hand, I drag folders of music onto my S3 and it just fucking plays them. I don't have to sync anything with my computer (and I don't), I get detailed metrics on what my apps are doing (which I find very useful) and I can tear out my default launcher and put something better in (which I have done). Oh and I can change the battery by popping the back off!

3. Actually good, useful smart phones are still a pretty damn new thing. Yeah technically they've been around for a while, but anybody who used a Palm Treo knows what I'm talking about. That means that all these "iphone is so much faster!" or "S4's battery life sucks!" is just related to the fact that we haven't figured it out yet. It takes time to really polish complicated tech.

As happy as I am to see Android thriving I'd prefer to see somebody other than Samsung on top.

Now, for some reason, Apple got the volumes mixed up so that it was IMPOSSIBLE to get any sound (except 6.) without plugging in a 30 pin connector and increasing the volume.

It took me MONTHS to work this out. All of the Apple "experts" I knew swore that this was not possible until I showed them. Even Apple said there was no bug and that it was faulty hardware, which I knew it wasn't.

The problem is that I keep on having similar issues with IOS. It's just "too clever" for its own good. Settings that you need are just not there (eg. accessing WIFI settings with a single click or slide).

There was also the time that iTunes REFUSED to copy music to my iPhone. If I used a 3rd party tool, songs would be copied and could play, but as soon as I used iTunes, it knew the new songs were "corrupted", and put the broken versions of the music on my phone. Thankfully, this bug only lasted a week.

I also find my iPhone 4s laggy. As an example, if I load a web page in the background, and try to scroll the current web page, the phone locks up for about 1000 milliseconds (ie. a VERY long time). It really infuriates me.

As for the Android lag, I am not sure what people are referring to. the Google hardware has not been a problem that I have seen - ever.

I think the best summary I can think of is that IOS is for people that don't want choice (eg. no FLAC, no 1080p MKV, no volume settings, you can't copy music files directly - you need iTunes, etc). Android has more that you need to know about, but at least you CAN find it if you want to.

I have a love/hate with IOS. But, when IOS pisses me off, it REALLY pisses me off. I can't say the same for Android.

You can see that I like choice. I also agree with others that I'd rather see Apple do well than Samsung. Samsung have a highly unethical history. If it weren't for Apple, Samsung would still be churning out rubbish handsets.

It's one of the worst user experiences I come across - very few UI's are so actively unfriendly to discoverability

People have different priorities. This is a tired meme; if you're that bothered by lag you're not using Android, if you're using Android it's not going to be such a huge change in the grand scheme of things. Can we have another argument for Apple superiority please?

Say what you will about Apple, but it's pretty clear they pride themselves on shipping things they are proud to put their name on because they only ship it when they feel the details are right. The App Store review process is in this spirit, they don't want shitty apps screwing up the experience on their phones.

This is why the Maps debacle was a catalyst for their stock plummeting, it showed to many this may have been lost with the loss of Jobs. I think the final build of iOS 7 is going to speak volumes about how Apple's culture has changed or not. If they get the details right, they've still got it. If it's laggy, has minor usability issues everywhere, etc, then that is the type of thing that I think spells Apple's doom.

edit: To summarize, I don't think 'animation lag' is in the same class of tradeoffs as 'open vs closed app stores.' Animation lag is a bug, and makes your work look objectively shitty, full stop. Animation lag 'matters' to everyone, even if they don't overtly notice it, because to everyone, animation lag breaks the illusion of fluid motion and interactivity on a subconscious level. It's sloppiness, plain and simple.

Your use of the word "shitty" here is highly subjective though. The evidence seems to be that most (or at very least a non-trivial subset of) consumers don't know, don't care or even actively prefer the "shitty" experience. Thus one could even argue that Samsung, far from being unaware or lazy is actively choosing this as the most rational and logical path to profits. It may just be that the people such as yourself are in the 10% of the population who are a) particularly sensitive to this sort of thing and b) extremely used to the iPhone level of experience.

Now I myself also find the stock Samsung experience incredibly ugly and laggy. The interesting thing is that you can remedy it in about 30 seconds by dragging a few widgets off the screen, disabling a few useless services and/or putting an alternative launcher on. Thus most of the lagginess is only "skin deep" and not a fundamental property of their phones. I think internally Samsung actually does very good engineering and optimization of their phones. At some point the marketing department gets a hold of the phone and completely ruins it, but thankfully it is too far down the chain for them to do any fundamental damage to it.

There is still such a thing as craftsmanship. When building a dresser, a craftsman ensures the back of the dresser looks as clean and elegant as the front, despite the fact that people will generally never see the back. A corporation churning out dressers as cheap as it can will just line the back with particle board. In furniture, where things generally don't change, this is a sound strategy, but in technology, building a company churning out garbage (relatively speaking) I think tends to catch up to you since you won't attract craftsmen to help create the next big thing.

If it wasn't obvious already, I'm an Apple shareholder, and I am not worried about Samsung. Samsung has made it very clear over and over that there is very little element of craftsmanship in their corporate culture, from the output of their work (like laggy animations and stock installs reminiscent of Windows 98 crapware) and the Onion-seque internal slide decks where they robotically ripped off every element of the iPhone they legally could, likely without asking themselves why those things were designed the way they were. I'm far more worried about Google, who have shown that they both can and want to get better at design, and have a unparalleled capability to build services to power well-designed products. And Microsoft has shown they have the will to change, and are swinging the bat, even though they haven't hit the ball yet.

Comparatively speaking Samsung is kind of a joke and when a new paradigm comes along (wearables, a dramatic shift in smartphones, etc) unless they can xerox their way to keeping up they will be left behind. They caught this particular wave perfectly, and are leveraging a very unique situation (Google being a free remote engineering department) to their advantage. I'm pretty sure the cat is out of the bag and Google is going to ensure Samsung is not riding their coattails to profits when the next wave hits.

I don't think you can really say this. They throw a lot of stuff against the wall that is original, and some of it does stick. The Galaxy Note was ridiculed by everybody but turned out to be a hit. The large size and stylus turn out to be a big selling features to people you wouldn't expect (eg: small women seem to love galaxy notes - because they were never able to fit a phone in their pocket in the first place, and many are used to carrying around a paper diary that is almost the same size anyway). They certainly copy a lot of stuff from Apple (and others) where they think that's the right path, but it's unfair to say they add nothing new.

> I'm an Apple shareholder, and I am not worried about Samsung

I'd go so far as to say that your kind of viewpoint might well be dominant inside Apple itself, and the "blind spot" it creates might be a major reason why Apple has struggled to compete against Samsung.

Bingo. Samsung doesn't have the same kind of refined, surgical design discipline that Apple does but that doesn't mean that they're incapable of coming up with interesting new features. They just arrive at them in a different way.

Honestly after using iOS 7 for a while I'm worried that Apple has seriously lost its way. There are so many instances of simplistic design ideology trumping usability in iOS 7 I'm not even sure where to start listing them. iOS < 7 was visually cheesy in some respects but it was extremely polished and usable.

If you call the s4 garbage relative to the iphone,then I'm sorry to say it's either you don't know the meaning of garbage or relative or you must be one desperate shareholder. I hope you didn't buy them at $700 apiece.

Samsung is already investing and developing its own wearable devices and other stuff anyway but I guess it doesn't matter to you. If I were you, I wouldn't buy stocks in both companies since they are all making money anyway.

ps: I neither use Apple or Samsung phone and I enjoy my phone very much

Did you buy at $700, at $400, or at $30?

This is false. Apple has banned applications for dubious grounds, such as competing with Apple. Extremely useful apps like Swype and its alternatives have been banned.

The app store is not just about protecting users from shitty apps, it is also about total control over the iOS platform, often to the detriment of users.

Honestly, I agree with about 99% of the 'pro-apple' arguments here, because it is frustrating that companies aren't stepping up their UX game, but that's just peanuts compared to this type of nonsense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6092875

Luckily, my Nexus 4 has given me a smoother experience than even my old ipad 2 so far (can't say the same of my nexus 7 unfortunately), so it isn't that bad either way.

Swype however is kind of an obvious example of something they likely are not allowing not because of fear of competition but because Swype, if successful, would effectively fragment the text input mechanism on iOS. I can respect the argument that on iOS Apple wants to maintain control of the experience of entering text. Regardless if you feel this is an ethical thing to do, I think you have to acknowledge that in that case it is less about anti-competitive behavior and more about maintaining consistency, which is a core tenet of good design. I think overall the App Store process is largely about maintaining things like quality, consistency, and performance, and if you don't believe me you can look to examples like the Facebook platform where the element of human-screening was ignored and the place filled up with garbage.

They simply don't care about the segment and would rather support a good-enough solution than a best-of-breed.

It's a pity too because the primitive stock keyboard is easily my #1 frustration as an iOS device user. Once you've gotten used to something like SwiftKey or Swype on Android it's hard not to get angry at Apple when you're forced to go back to their 2007 keyboard. How is this putting the user first?

I think a bug is more forgivable than a deliberate decision to make things broken (closed app store).

Apple has had a string of shitty products. It's just that people are too busy talking about their good ones and block out the bad ones, for some reason giving Apple a free pass that they don't give other vendors.

I once got a video ipod. The marketing was "You can watch movies on it!". Yes, if those movies are shorter than 45 minutes in length. It was actually a substandard bit of kit - the video screen was mostly useless, and the windows version of iTunes that I had to load it with was unmitigated shit - and famously so.

I mean what about comparing an animation lag - an annoyance - to the 'death grip' phone that didn't work as a phone?

Apple make nice kit, but the idea that they only do good work needs to die. They are superior designers and astounding marketers, but they're certainly not perfect.

It's likely that in time we'll see a native of manually memory-managed runtime in Android, at a huge development cost; I can hardly see Apple providing an open ecosystem, ever.

That aside, Samsung is the most successful company with the worst design aesthetic I can think of. I don't know why people buy their devices, even if one is an Android fanatic there are devices that lag less and look much better at better prices. I'm shocked they are doing as well as they are.

That's legit.

>I'm going by YouTube videos of the s4.

That is not.

Scrolling web pages was noticeably nicer and less laggy than in my Nexus, but still imperfect.

My iPhone OG was quite responsive until about iOS3, when it got kind of slow.

I've never had problems scrolling in non-web-based apps.

Of course, the equivalent operation on a similar-year Android or Blackberry makes you wonder why anyone bought those phones.

I am still yet to see these on my Nexus 4. Maybe some devices have the problem, but it was blown out of proportion? I don't know..

Samsung does make the Nexus 10 though, but even on 4.3 it stutters pretty regularly. Of course my iPad 3 stutters a bit too, I assume the extreme resolution plays a big role there.