You said innovative.....
Speakers: I mentioned them already.
screen: it's a 4.7" LCD. how is it innovative?
aluminium body: apple
battery: what's innovative about the battery?
Screen- Whilst every other Android manufacturer was going for massive screens HTC went with a more reasonable sized screen and it was the most detailed screen out at the time (and possibly still is?).
Alu body - Can't think of any other Android manufacturer that have an aluminium shell/decent body. The Xperia Z is nice, but ruined by the screen. Whilst not innovative in the mobile world, it definitely was in the Android world.
Battery - After having a Galaxy S2 and the girlfriend having a GS3, not having to carry around a spare battery and still getting home at the end of the day with 30-40% battery life was something of a revelation to me.
Speaker - No need to say more about this.
Camera - It's fantastic.
Sense UI - This again has been thought about. It hasn't taken over Android, it has enhanced it. I actually didn't mind Touchwiz, but on the later Galaxy phones, they've just gone bonkers with it. It's so loaded down with crap that no one will ever use, that it affects the whole experience.
Whilst perhaps all of these weren't innovative in their own right, putting them all together in the same package was. It was more focussed on what the end user wanted. Not what Samsung wanted the end user to want.
Every other phone on the market had major flaws to it. Some had terrible battery life, some were made from POLYCARBONATE (...plastic), some had washed out screens, some were too large, some weren't powerful enough, some were loaded with insane amounts of junk.
It wasn't obvious no, because you said the s2 was the best in the range. It might have had the biggest lead at release (like i said) but it was just as flawed then as the gs4 is now. The display, for example, was all over the shop colour-wise, and not that we knew it at the time but quite susceptible to screen burn.
Seriously? You seriously thought i was talking about specs?
Yeah, because the GS2 is just so much more powerful that the GS4 right?
The GS2 was no where near a flawed as the GS4 is. The GS2 was new, exciting and where Android really took a leap forward. The GS4 has taken baby steps forward from the GS3, and that's being kind to it.
1) The Snapdragon 600 was the best chipset out when they made it, so your point about them not playing the numbers game is meaningless. The sequel to the One will also have the fastest CPU available.
Yep, but they didn't clock it and didn't play the numbers game like Samsung did. They knew that theirs would look worse on paper, but they cared more about the bigger picture than beating another manufacturer on the spec list
2) Battery is known for being sub-par.
Known < experienced. It isn't. It isn't at all.
3) Camera is widely regarded as nothing special and too low resolution, despite all the hype.
Again "widely regarded"? By who? You?
The camera was very much welcomed by those in the know about cameras and reviews. I have done a side by side comparison with various scenes from my GS2 8MP and the One destroys it for fun. Fair enough, that was to be expected.
VS the GS3 it takes so much better photos that aren't scenery.
VS GS4 - no idea.
Again this was another area where HTC could have said "yeah! lets stick a million mega pixel camera just to try and show we're exactly the same as every other manufacturer". It was a bold move not to, but the phone is so much better for it. Something ridiculous like 90% of all photos taken on camera phones never get viewed on anything other than a mobile screen. Not to mention, why oh why do you want pictures that are now, what, 6-7MBs EACH? Just in case you decide to put it on you brand new £10000 4K TV? Sending and backing up photos with 1.5-2MB photos is just so much easier. And it negates the need for massive amounts of space on the phone.
All of these things have clearly been thought about and taken into account when the One was conceived. What do you think Samsung thought about when they made the GS4 - just making it bigger, with more power and more space than the GS3. They didn't even change the look of it ffs, that's how lazy they were about it.
I've said it before and i'll say it again, you get the best products from companies that are the number 2 or 3 or 4. The number one companies always end up resting on their laurels. When Samsung were playing catch up to Apple, they produced the GS2 - a brilliant phone which arguably is where the whole Galaxy range took off. Now what are Samsung making? The same phone as last year.
When Apple were still wowing us with their latest phones, they were producing things like the retina display and all glass bodies. Now what are they producing? The same phone as last year.
I sincerely hope Samsung make a genuinely good GS5 because i will happily buy it. I don't have any biases when it comes to phone manufacturers, i go for the best phone regardless of who makes it. But i think the only way Samsung will make a truly great phone is if they stop chasing the numbers game, start thinking about the USER EXPERIENCE (now there's a dirty word for an Android manufacturer) and really think about making a phone that takes people's breath away.
The numbers game is finite. People are realising their GS2's/GS3's don't need to be updated every 18/24months because they are still powerful enough to run everything quite happily. It's not like when Android was at 2.2 level. That's why manufacturers need to look at other things to sell their phones - i just hope Samsung don't go down the line of introducing another 400 useless "Smart ....." gimmicks.
