[ONE General] LiquidSolstice:
Oh man, so much ignorance. I'm sorry, I'm going to have to address this post and it is going to be a long reply.

Then clearly your use case does not match this phone and you should focus on phones that do meet your use case instead of whining to the rest of us about how we're all wrong for not using our phones like you do.

No, you are still an exception. There are a lot of you who are exceptions only because there are a lot of Galaxy devices in the world. The SD card and removable battery is only a selling point to techies and people like you who frequent XDA. I have yet to ever meet anyone who owns and of the Galaxy phones who carries around spare batteries or jammed in a giant SD card. I see the phones every where, but not one single example of anyone changing the battery.

The iPhone sells HUGE numbers all around the world as well, and has never had a removable battery or SD card, therefore your anecdote and your claims about why Samsung sales are so high are not with merit. Because if they were, I could turn around and infer that people buy iPhones because they DON'T have removable storage or batteries, but that wouldn't make an ounce of sense, would it? No, it wouldn't. You like the idea of SD storage and a removable battery, you see other comments on tech sites who also like them, therefore you have come to the conclusion that they are a "standard".

...do you even know how many pictures you can fit on 4-9GB? 8GB of storage at a 16MP resolution with full 100% quality JPEG compression is enough to store ~1,430 pictures (more or less depending on the content in the image). Are you telling me that you'll take more pictures than that between the times where you remove images from your device or you let them cloud upload and then clean them up? It is the norm to use cloud upload and it is the norm to take pictures only for temporary use such as social network sites and then just remove them (most people stop caring about their images unless they are of kids, private events, special occasions, or otherwise, because if they're worth sharing they're already either printed/framed or they're on a social network).

Normal Android users do not use hundreds of apps at a time. Forget games with their multi-gigabyte additional files; the average Android app (non-game) APK is roughly 7-12MB. If you simultaneously had 100 applications installed (which in itself is utterly bonkers and at the point where you can't remember what apps you have installed), that's 1.2GB of apps, call it 1.5GB of apps after they generate their various data files on storage. Still leaves plenty of space for music, podcasts, and video content.

...I have unlimited data, but I only let my images upload over Wifi because I want my bandwidth for my mobile use. Who uses their mobile data for camera upload!? That is a ridiculous idea.

The fact that you said the HTC One has a "such a crappy low-megapixel camera" and that you think the reason it has a "crappy low megapixel camera" is because of your country's terrible 3G coverage clearly tells all of us that you quite literally have no clue what you are talking about. . HTC did not build a phone that caters to your country's mobile infrastructure, and the idea that you think that it is shows either a level of fanaticism or just plain foolishness.

Again, you have no idea how video formats, containers, codecs, or compression works either. Using the current most popular 4K video compression, a minute of 4K video is roughly 350MB in side. It is HIGHLY doubtful that anyone would be recording a very long scene using a smartphone camera, much less doing it in 4K. Mobile video capture has always been for very short clips, because people taking the video don't have the patience to record for longer than a minute or two minutes, and people watching don't have the patience to sit through more than one or two minutes of amateur home video anyway. Would you honestly watch more than 3 minutes of someone's smartphone-recorded video? I mean, really?

But you know, reality...and stuff.

:mad: Something you are actually correct about! You're right. KitKat did not "break" the SD card. The Android Open Source Project stopped any type of official support for exandable FAT32/exFAT based storage as of 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Every single implementation since then for external storage has been third-party. There are numerous reasons for this, and it's not all just about everyone's conspiracy that they want you to use their cloud services. Having a filesystem which uses FAT requires licensing from Microsoft, and is a security concern or a myriad of reasons. I suggest you read more into why KitKat specifically started to prevent apps from modifying data on a FAT-formatted SD card.

And none of them (not even Google Play Music) use any sort of official implementation from Google to do so. It's all hacked together, and it always will be.

Oh look, more ignorance, although in this case, it's forgivable. You can almost be guaranteed that CyangoenMod on the One will NOT include root access out of the box, because then their build of Android would not pass Google's Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) which it requires any Google-Apps partner to run. If you want root, you will have to go through a process of getting it (official process, yes, but again, not out of the box).

Look, some things you say may be valid for you, but you're extrapolating far too much and in some cases you're really not thinking your ideas through. You lack a lot of empirical evidence to support your empirical claims and easily Google-able facts concerning things like video compression and Android security issues are not outside of your grasp but you don't include them either.

Simply put, you believe you are right about your opinions simply because you want them to be right and you find yourself surrounded by other (particularly Galaxy users) who always want to be right. But Google is not stupid, they know what they are doing. Before getting outraged, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and research before coming to a conclusion.