[General Questions and Answers] alexvoda:
Xperia T versus Galaxy S III for anime video

Hello XDA.

What should I choose between the following phones if my main and most taxing usage of it will be watching anime?

Anime right now is mostly available in 720p resolution encoded with h.264 High10p(rofile). I do not want to re-encode anything.

Samsung Galaxy SIII (quad core Exynos)

Sony Xperia T (dual core Krait - MSM8260A)Edit: Or alternatively the Sony Xperia TX with the same specs.

Acer CloudMobile S500 (dual core Krait - MSM8260A)

Price:

The SIII would be the most expensive, the S500 the cheapest(if I can still find it).

I am not buying them subsidized.

Common features:

For all I know the SIII and Xperia T both have good 3rd party ROMs and support from the community if I want to go the pure Android way, and most probably I will be interested in the future. Not sure about the Acer.

All have microSD slots. And all have 720p screens. All have powerful (but not the most powerful) CPUs and GPUs. (all a must for heavy media consumption)

Different faults and features:

-The Acer S500 is the cheapest, has an ideal 4.3 inch size and good specs on paper but has a puny battery and community support for it is probably lacking.

-The Xperia T has the best camera, is slightly larger than ideal but has no glaring faults other than the non removable battery.

-The Galaxy SIII is the most popular so community support should be great, but it is huge and plasticky.

Bias:

I am slightly biased towards the T because of:

-shutter button

-easy accessible MicroSD slot

-smaller than the SIII (I think 4.3 inch is ideal)

-the design is sweet and it's probably the last phone with the green liquid energy SE logo

I have a slight bias against Samsung and the SIII in particular:

-it's huge (I think the SIII is huge, and the Note II is Gargantuan.)

-I never got that Kies software to work with the only Samsung phone in my family (Samsung Mini 2) in order to upgrade it to ICS.

Non-options:

The following bring

no advantage

for my use case, so they are not an option:

-HTC One X

-Any phablet like the Samsung Galaxy Note II

-Any iOS device

-Any Windows Phone 7/8 device

-Any phone with a screen below 720p

-A tablet (I want to carry only one device)

The following I can not buy (in parentheses main advantages/disadvantages compared to the ones above, mainly the Xperia T) because they are

not yet available

and I can't really wait until they will be (I am from Romania, no Nexus 4 here):

-Sony Xperia V (ideal 4.3 inch size, MSM8960 instead of MSM8260A)

-Xiaomi Mi2 (ideal 4.3 inch size, APQ8064, No MicroSD)

-LG Optimus G (APQ8064, big)

-Nexus 4 (stock Android, APQ8064, but NO MicroSD and small storage, big, no Google Play discount)

-Asus PadFone2 (APQ8064, no MicroSD, big)

-HTC J Butterfly/DNA (1080p, APQ8064, huge)

-Oppo Find 5 (1080p, APQ8064, huge)

-future Sony Odin/Yuga (1080p, huge)

-future Samsung Galaxy SIV (1080p, huge)

-future Nvidia Tegra 4 devices

I think I will be better off getting one of the three now and upgrading to a Nexus 1080p device in the future.

Am I overlooking some important aspect?

Am I overlooking some other option?

Should I ask this in a different thread?

For High10p encoded video (which IIRC must be software decoded, so no GPU) do I benefit more from 2 more powerful CPU cores(MSM8260A) or from 4 weaker cores(Exynos 4 Quad) ?

What should I choose?

P.S.: To enhance readability I enlarged and bolded all the important parts but still included many details resulting in a long post against the recommendations of the XDADevelopers Forum introductory video.