You: I hate my iPhone 5 because I received one with a defective sleep/wake button and refuse to have it replaced under warranty because I'm crazy. I will also confuse build quality and quality control and claim that the product with the best build quality in the industry has the worst. I also think that an inferior phone is somehow better because people own it...
Me: Right.
Here's another convo you might be interested in, this one based on a real conversation:
Consumer #1: Yeah as a long time iPhone owner I ditched it for the Galaxy S3 this time around, they say it's much better.
Consumer #2: I've heard the same thing.
Consumer #1: Yeah it's great!
Skeptic: How is it much better?
Consumer #1: Because the screen is better.
Skeptic: No it's not. The S3 screen is a very cheap unit. If you rock the display left to right for example on the S3 you'll see that the color violently changes to weird tones from just a few degrees away from the viewing angle. On top of that if you look at the colors they're completely off and messed up on the S3.
Consumer #1: What do you mean the colors are messed up?
Skeptic: Let me show you I'll pull up the same photo. *pulls up photo* it looks like you're looking through a cheap instagram filter at everything.
Consumer #1: Wow I've never noticed that before. But the S3 has more pixels.
Skeptic: No really. It has a higher resolution but it has fewer pixel sites. The screen on the iPhone 5 is made up of an even amount of red green and blue pixels. On the S3 there are half the red and blue pixels. Which means that overall there are about 30% fewer pixel sites on the S3, at a higher resolution and greater DPI. This results in a serious cross hatching pattern that makes the screen look noticeably grainy, which is the problem that more resolution is supposed to fix and is responsible for a very poor color gamut that makes everything look like it's through a filter. On top of that if you look at the screen itself next to mine you'll see that it's less than half the brightness.
Consumer #2: But the S3 is faster with a better processor.
Skeptic: No, not really. The international version of the S3 has the quad core Exynos 1.4 gig processor, the US version has a dual core 1.5 gig processor. The iPhone 5 processors is the A6 1.02 gig processor that can selectively ramp it's clock speed up to 1.3 gigs and possibly beyond.
Consumer #2: Right so 1.5 is more than 1.3.
Skeptic: No it actually ends up being slower. You can't really compare two different processors with two different architectures, it's a very bad comparison. In the end on benchmarks the iPhone 5 processor performs nearly identically to the Galaxy S3 international quad core version, and is about 15% faster than the US dual core LTE galaxy S3. With graphics processor you can compare them more directly and the iPhone 5 has about 28 gigaflops of processing power with it's PowerVR graphics chip while the Galaxy S3 only has 7 gigaflops of graphics processing power, which is 4 times less. So that's 15% more CPU and 4 times more GPU.
Consumer #1: Oh well I thought it was faster, I didn't know it has that much slower. I like the voice recognition on the S3 compared to my old iPhone 4 though. It's more accurate.
Skeptic: Voice recognition is all based on the Hidden Markov Model algorithm and is generally around 90% accurate with a large word bank and 99% accurate with a small word bank. So any difference you see doesn't have anything to do with the processing and is likely a coincidence but Apple also added a microphone on the back of the iPhone 5 which picks up surrounding audio and will cancel it out which means it sends a much cleaner signal for voice recognition and you can use it in loud places. The iPhone 5 is the only phone which has this features because Apple has the patent on it, which also means it has the best voice recognition accuracy. The iPhone 5 also improved it's response quality to be on par with Jelly Bean, which was the number one downside to the old 4S. So voice recognition should be better on the iPhone 5.
Consumer #1: That's pretty Interesting, I didn't know voice recognition worked on a common forumula, maybe it was a coincidence or I just started talking to my phone clearly. I like form of the S3 though.
Skeptic: The S3 is built like a children's toy. Apple is really the only company that makes high quality cell phones right now. Other manufacturers cut costs left and right making their devices out of the most inexpensive plastic and then advertising to no end when they put a 5 cent piece of kevlar fabric on the back like it's their greatest achievement. Cell phone manufactures besides Apple make cheap low quality devices. Apple's iPhone 5 is said to be the most difficult to manufacture consumer device ever made by Foxconn. They actually are the first manufacturer to use crystalline diamond milled aluminum on a consumer device which cuts and polishes the edge at the same time. They also use lasers to cut out all the ports so there are no finishing marks.
Consumer #1: Oh wow, I never though about the quality before. I just kind of looked at the color and that was it. What I meant though is I like that it has a bigger screen and that's what I really noticed about it. I ignored the rest. But I did like the neat features like locking the phone or silencing it when you lay it on the screen, and the weather widgets on the home screen.
Skeptic: My iPhone 5 does each of those things you describe. You can instal them through the Cyndia store along with over 90% of Android's unique features. It takes 5 minutes to set up. I can't really help you with the screen size though, so you would have said that the iPhone 5 is much better if it had a bigger screen though right?
Consumer #1: Yep
Consumer #2: Pretty much
In case you were wondering the only features that the S3 has over the iPhone 5 a are a few proprietary samsung software features, NFC, a removable battery and removable storage. The removable storage is over 15 times slower than internal storage and takes ages to load anything, and has a lower internal storage, and the removable battery can be added with a slim battery case for the iPhone 5, which takes up about the same amount of room in your pocket as an extra battery and is easier to use. NFC isn't that useful.
