Wrote up my first impressions of the Galaxy S4 here:
http://putthatback.org/samsung-galaxy-s4-first-impressions/
But to get straight to the point and to skip everything, here's what I think...
Pros
- Beautiful display
- Good overall performance
- Excellent camera quality with daylight
- Very lightweight device
- Awesome camera features
Cons
- Unimpressive build quality
- Obvious lag due to system bloat
- A lot of features are half baked
- Half of 16GB storage available out of box
Please don't flame me, these are just my FIRST IMPRESSIONS as I have used this through the weekend
No one should flame you. Your opinions are as valid as anyone else's and many reviewers shared similar impression.
Indeed those are pretty much my exact thoughts, although I actually thought the build quality of the device was actually very good. (Perhaps you mean build materials rather than build quality?)
For me had the device shipped with stock android or at least a not so heavy in resources OS - I'd have kept it. I'm too paranoid to root and run roms. I don't want to void my warranty to get a device to work as I want it to.
For me the S4 fab phone hardware wise, let down by Samsung overworking the software. For every new feature or software introduced, Samsung should have spent 3X as much effort optimising it, increasing overall performance (not synthetic benchmark performance but real work performance) and GUI fluidity. As soon as any new features introduced begin hurting performance and user experience, that's a point to stop and refine - if you can't refine it, then take it out. Hopefully Samsung take this aproach with the Note 3 and S5 next year.
Its interesting to see those that have flashed rom or now running cyanogen onto the device are already seeing memory usage drop by up to 2/3 rds. That if anything is a testament to how wasteful to me Sammy has made Touchwiz.