[Motorola Photon 4G] thundercles:
The man from china knows the virtues of good american engineered products.

When I first saw that Samsung was releasing the "galaxy" line and it was supposed to be a top tier (having an arm7 was generally a good indicator of "premium" android devices as opposed to the arm6 in the pretty much all the Lgs, huewui, and other samsungs such as the moment) line in direct competition with Motorola and HTC.

The problem is in my experience and it doesn't seem to be limited to me and people I've personally known, Samsung just makes phones that are extremely buggy and problematic. They have been throwing the same or comparable hardware in a phone design, but the designs have been historically poor even though the specs show otherwise. I remember when touchscreens first became commonplace Samsung digitizers were the source of many many problems for people, and it was awhile before samsung touchscreen phones lost the reputation of being very tempermental. They managed to mass produce good working flip phones at a very low price and seemed to dominate the paygo phone market because of that, but they stayed married to proprietary charging ports that they changed about three times and all of which were prone to breaking and sent weak signals through the few data cables that circulated. Sure the flip phones were fine, but compare them to motorola's razr, which was damn near the only flip phone they made from then on. The few others were robust physically and included really neat features like a verizon motorola flip phone I had had fax integration and few other things you'd never expect from a brew phone.

I see similar trends in the android devices, Samsungs seem to be hit and miss and even the hits seem underdesigned even though the hardware contained is top-notch, this is glaringly obvious when one hops on an HTC or Motorola phone after using almost any of the Samsung phones, they just seem like they have been rushed to production. Samsung seems to be very religious about releasing updates regularly, but comon, they need to if they hit the production line with bugs.

Samsung tries to do too much and succeed in all areas and niches of all markets. In my experience they usually come up a little short but still make solid products in general. Motorola and HTC only focus on the higher ends of the android market, and When I think back I'm pretty much unable to think of ANY poorly designed products made by motorola, both in physical design and the ideas that went into its features and functionality. Whether its the PowerPC architecture used in Macs until they stopped manufacturing them for Apple due to their inability to sell enough personal computers to be worth maintaining a whole architecture, they are the proprietors of type 22 trunking in two way UHF/VHF radios, which is the de facto standard in corporate use of walkie talkies now, they are a company that puts out excellent products. When I got the photon I was only looking at HTCs and Motorolas, I had been flashing phones to cricket since cricket is a very popular carrier in this area and has an open MEID database, yet most people around here struggle with getting full MMS and Data functionality. After so many one night stands with androids from that, I have to say HTC and Motorola set a clear standard that all other manufacturers are measured against.