[One (M7) General] Shasarak:
Let me begin by saying that I think this is a very reasonable thread. I don't necessarily begrudge people who have a strong erotic fixation on the One and want to have the law changed so that they can marry it - if that's what turns you on, great, I have no problem with that as such. But there are also quite a few people in the world who are more interested in an objective, balanced view (for example, because they have yet to make a purchasing decision); if everyone is effectively banned from saying anything negative about the phone then getting an accurate, balanced picture is impossible; and the level of fanaticism on this forum is such that, in most threads, attempting to introduce a little balance will get you accused of having "a vendetta against the phone" or even of being paid by Samsung.

Second thing to say is that I own a One, and have done since it launched in the UK on March 15th. I have no plans to sell it.

To my mind, possibly the One's greatest strength is not so much that it is vastly superior to its superiors in any one respect (though it is superior, in several ways), it is more the fact that, with one or two exceptions, it really doesn't have much in the way of major, deal-breaking weak-spots. Most other phones will have something that regularly makes you grind your teeth, even if everything else is okay. The One has a number of minor niggles; but they're all minor enough that you don't find yourself constantly questioning your purchase decision.

The only major weak-spots are very well known: the lack of a removable battery, and the lack of expandable storage. One can use an external battery, but that still requires you to keep the phone plugged in for at least a couple of hours a day - interchangeable batteries can be charged outside the phone and swapped at will, meaning the phone never has to be plugged in at all. 32GB is HOPELESSLY inadequate if you plan on watching hi-def video a lot - a single film at 720p can easily be 6-8GB. It doesn't require very many photos taken with the Zoe feature enabled to fill up most of the phone. OTG storage helps a lot, of course (and I use it) but it's not a substitute: there's too much bulk, accessing OTG storage runs the battery down, and you can't simultaneously access the storage and charge the phone. Cloud storage can't be used for streaming hi-def video (not over 3G anyway).

If you can manage to get hold of a 64GB model, that should be a lot more comfortable.

The more minor niggles:

- An almost-major niggle is the lack of a dedicated menu button. Approximately 90% of the apps I use expect there to be one, which results in you losing 200 rows of screen pixels when you run them. (Especially annoying in games).

- Battery life is a mixed bag. For general use it's quite good. It's rather poor if you watch a lot of video, because (for some reason) you have to turn up the display brightness higher than you do for most other things. It also runs down very quickly indeed if you're using Zoe mode on the camera, because it's capturing photos and video continuously the whole time, not just when you press the shutter button.

- It does get quite hot in use. (I have a theory that the black version might keep a little cooler than the silver, but haven't been able to test that).

- The power button is impossible to reach without moving the phone in your hand, and the volume buttons are flush with the case which makes them difficult to find by touch and difficult to press.

- Minimum sound volume in the speakers is too high, and the vibration very intense. (At work I have to keep it on silent and with vibrate switched off so as not to disturb anyone). Of course, the quality and volume of the speakers when turned up is a big positive!

- The display calibration is a bit off - not enough red makes everything look cold. If you're used to OLED displays you won't the like black-level, but it's good for LCD. (In other ways, though, the display is very good; and of course you'll be spared OLED screen-burn - this is embarassingly bad on my old GS2).

- The stock web browser doesn't work very well if you have more than 6 or 7 tabs open - takes forever for pages to load. (Possibly it runs out of RAM, I don't know). It also has an annoying tendency to reload pages it has already loaded if you switch to another app and back.

- If you're taking pictures in bright daylight, and you want to crop or zoom the image a lot, the 4MP sensor is annoying. (But in any other situation it's very good, and excels in low light).

- The keeping-your-finger-down-and-tracing-a-pattern-over-the-letters keyboard has some serious problems: for example, if you type a single or double quote or a left-bracket and then try to trace out a word, it won't do it; you have to type it out pressing one key at a time instead of tracing. It also lacks a lot of useful shortcuts that you'll find on Swype on Samsung phones: you can't, for example, type a comma by tracing comma-space, instead it requires two presses; same applies to the words "a" and "I".

- Lack of sensitivity/accuracy on capacitive buttons. (v1.29 software supposedly helps with this, but it isn't available for my handset yet so I don't know).

- Four home-screen panels isn't enough if you want to use large widgets.

A lot of people have mentioned charging time: it actually isn't *too* bad so long as you don't try to charge above 90%.