[AT&T Samsung Galaxy S 4 General] pacosuave:
Regret NOT getting the S4

First I decided that I would get an HTC One over the S4 but then the S4 Active came out and I thought..."oh this changes everything" since every review said it was what the original S4 should have been and the water/dust proof feature was appealing to me and I wanted to be able to take underwater photos and videos...how cool right? Also the 3 physical buttons and LCD screen that is more visible in sunlight...bla bla bla...read reviews that said all of these things made the Active the phone to get...

...but I'm big into rooting and custom roms...not so good for the Active. This was right when it came out and I was within my 14 days to return and at that point there was no root option for the Active (I understand there is a root now). There still is no official forum for the Active and I haven't seen any custom ROMS for it either. Also while doing simple things like scrolling down a web page in the chrome browser it would lag and not follow my finger...same thing happened on a demo unit at the AT&T store...So long story short, I returned it

...and got the HTC One which did not have any issues with smoothness and at least it had a known root method and unlockable bootloader with plenty of custom ROMS to choose from. The speakers are amazing and the phone is beautiful. That's where the pros stop. The lack of a dedicated menu button is annoying when some apps eat up some of the screen real estate with the triple dot burger button even when the button DOES NOTHING!. The fixes for it are to either have the upper half of the htc logo where there is a small strip of capacitive area mapped to the menu (this is my favorite although sometimes I hit it by mistake while trying to type a space on the keyboard or I click on something on the bottom middle of the screen instead of hitting the menu button like I intended). Another option is to remap long pressing the home button to menu (so annoying when it exits your app to the home screen because you didn't hold it hard or long enough...) Some ROMS even have the option to map a long press of the back button to act as menu...also annoying when it doesn't register...Sorry for the ramble but there is just no easy fix for a bad design on HTC's part...

The battery life on the One is not impressive...I'm coming from the iPhone 4S which I never really had any issues using it as much as I wanted and making it through a whole day...also the HTC One takes forever to charge (even on the stock charger, forget about using other USB charging options like the USB port on your PC...could take like 6 hours to fully charge on some usb ports.) The high capacity batteries of these android phones are toted as a feature because more is better right? Not if the phone takes forever to charge and still gets less practical battery life than a phone with a battery that is half the capacity.

The removable SD card would be nice for when I'm moving from one ROM to another and can set aside my "main" SD card with all my apps and backups while installing new roms and then be able to swap it back into the phone when the installation is finished. I'm not an expert with how the file system and partitioning works on these Android phones...it's confusing on the HTC One since it has an emulated SDcard and seems you can browse to the same location in 3 different places....Sorry don't really know how to explain it but things were just much more easy to understand on previous android devices I've owned that had dedicated SD card slots. Also 32GB got used up really fast...would have loved to be able to add a 64GB SD Card for $50 or less.

Then there's the accessories available for the HTC One versus the original S4. Wireless charging isn't easy to add to the HTC given the fact that the back isn't removable...there are some cases on ebay that have a couple wires run down to the USB port but that looks questionable to me...I'm not interested in slapping some cheap semi-exposed wiring on my $600 phone. I thought I'd be able to connect my game controllers to the HTC One like the wii remote, PS3 and XBOX Controller but I have yet to see anyone be able to do this. HTC does weird stuff with their bluetooth stack and Samsung doesn't have issues connecting to the PS3 controller or the Wii Remote over bluetooth. The XBOX controller over USB OTG I guess doesn't get enough power from the HTC One where the Samsung doesn't seem to have this issue. I can't name the apps but I've read some developers comments saying things like "Some HTC Devices have issues with our app"...Long story short the Samsung Galaxy S 4 is the standard for android right now...developers will always make sure their app works on a Galaxy S3 or S4 before moving onto other devices like the HTC One...

So I regret not just getting the S4 Original in the first place...I'm not sure what happened to people on AT&T that took an OTA update that locked their bootloaders and I'm going to spend the day reading up more on this. My plan is to trade for or buy an S4 from someone on craigslist and I need to be prepared to check the kernel, firmware, software, hardware versions and make sure I don't get ripped off and end up with a fake. I plan to meet at an AT&T store and have everything checked out before buying anything.

I hope my rambling helps some people. I don't hate my HTC One and I'm figuring out how to deal with the issues and just enjoy the great things about it in the meantime but "the grass is always greener" is definitely manifesting itself with me and my HTC One with the S4 "on the other side of the fence."