[Galaxy S III General] setspeed:
A work colleague came and asked me to explain a few things about her new S3 today, since she knows I have one and she upgraded to it after having a little look at mine last week. She had an iPhone before.

1. Play Store default setting is to dump app icons all over your homescreens - she had about 30 icons dotted across her home screens, and she couldn't understand why they were duplicated there and in her app drawer.

2. The Touchwiz launcher default is not to alphabetically organise your apps, and she said she had a hard time finding each app when she wanted to use it

3. Some of the cool features are not turned on by default, and are buried in menus which a novice user is not going to find. Case in point, voice control of apps is under Settings in S Voice. First off there is no indication that Settings is even there unless you know to pres the menu button (not intuitive at all). If these features were turned on in the first place then the popup notifications you get when using the apps would've told her about their existence, and hence she could've been using them on her own.

4. Disabling built in apps - first off she had no idea that it could be done, she just knew that she couldn't uninstall them via Play Store like her downloaded apps, and there lots she wanted rid of. When I showed her the Applications Manager this caused confusion on three counts:

A) why is there two places to get rid of/disable apps,

B) why do you have to uninstall updates to some built in apps before the disable button is shown,

C) she didn't feel comfortable messing around in a menu which clearly has essential system apps with weird (to a novice) names such as Certificate Installer, Factory Test, Security Storage and com.android.smspush

5. She didn't really understand what a Widget was and why there was a list of them at the end of her app drawer, and how to use them. I can't remember whether the setup wizard covers widgets or not, but suffice to say if it did then she had not understood it, and dismissed it. She was scrolling to the end of the apps into her widgets and saying "I don't understand these funny looking apps - they don't do anything when I press them"... She did not see the tab at the top which detotes the difference between apps and widgets, and there is no other indication when you get into the widgets.

6. She says the battery life is not good compared to her old iPhone. After having a quick look at her Battery stats (unplugged after full charge, 7.5hrs off the charger 1.5hrs screen on time, 25% battery left) there was nothing in particular acting up, however her cell reception was burning a lot of the battery. She said that her reception (measured by the number of bars - I know, I know!) was not as good as her iPhone. So the 2 issues here are that her battery is objectively not as good, and her reception is subjectively not as good as her old iPhone.

7. She does like the camera, but was unaware of features such as panorama and shooting stills whilst recording video (and I'll mention again, the possibility of voice control). However she WAS aware that the new iPhone does these things (minus the voice control).

8. She didn't understand why she needed multiple accounts for things, Google, Samsung, Dropbox - she was unaware of what these accounts were even used for, and she thought it confusing to have them all on her phone. I didn't check, but it wouldn't surprise me if she was saving all her contacts to her phone rather than her Google account and thus negating a large benefit of having an Android phone.

All these things are minor to the likes of us who are used to Android, but she felt confused and out of her depth with the phone. I tried to show her stuff and reassure her, and she has said she will give it a few more days - but she isn't comfortable with it and may return it for another iPhone...

Admittedly she is not a techie sort of person, but I do feel that Samsung (and Google) could do a bit more to simplify things for the likes of her, because ultimately they are competing against Apple the masters of simple and making people feel at home with their devices.

My discussion with her has really opened my eyes as to why so many people love the iPhone, despite it being inferior in many ways to the S3. I guess you can sell a Ferrari at Ford prices, but not everyone has the skills to drive and park such a machine...

Opinions?