Should I get an iPhone 5c or a Samsung Galaxy S4?

…I am finally, finally joining the twenty-first century and getting a smartphone, after years of digging in my heels.

The free phones available are the iPhone 5c and the Samsung Galaxy S4, so I’ll probably be looking at one of those. Which one should I get? This is your chance to sway me to your side! :slight_smile:

Pluses of the iPhone:
-I am hooked in to the iEconomy through my iPad. Almost all the stuff I have on it is free apps, so it’s not like I would be losing a lot of money or anything, but I feel like it would be sort of annoying to have to figure out how to download things again, etc. Then again, I guess I could always keep my iPad around.
-Along the same lines, I’m more familiar with how Apple products work.
-My parents and mr. hunter’s parents are on iPhones/iPads, so we’d be able to do FaceTime with them. Again, I guess I’d be able to keep my iPad around for that.
-It’s probably easier to use?
-A little smaller, which I like (I tend to carry too much stuff in my purse, have things fall out of my pockets, etc., and my hands are on the small side anyway)
-My experience has been that at least recently, Apple Maps is better than Google Maps for GPS-navigational needs.

Pluses of the Galaxy (at least, as far as I know):
-It seems to have a better camera – can anyone weigh in on this?
-More customizable, which might be interesting to play with at some point.
-Being able to add subsidiary memory. This is huge, as the iPhone has only 8GB and the Galaxy has only 16GB.
-Minor point: I guess I like the idea of being an Android geek rather than an Apple one.
-This is really totally minor, but I’d be able to pick it up tomorrow.

Both of them have mobile hotspot capability, which was an absolute requirement for me.

Can anyone weigh in on which is likely to have better battery life? That’s also a major consideration. And which is the better phone?

What exactly do you want to use it for?

Umm… a phone, mostly? And a mobile hotspot when traveling. And texting. And a camera.

Judging by the way I use my iPad, I’d probably additionally use it a lot for surfing the internet, GPS, and reading books, primarily. Possibly for listening to music, but 8GB isn’t that much and I might not put much music on an iPhone.

I probably wouldn’t use it for watching movies or for doing processor-intensive things, I imagine? The form factor doesn’t really seem right for that. I also don’t see myself doing a lot of typing-ish things on it, except for texting.

What else might I use it for?

Here are some posts comparing the two:
https://www.google.com/search?q=iPhone+5c+or+a+Samsung+Galaxy+S4

“Free” phones are not free. That 2 year contract means you will be paying somewhere around $65*24 = $1560 at the low end, and more realistically about $2400.

Since you are already paying a couple thousand dollars, an extra $100-$300 is a very small amount of money. The newer phones are **substantially **better -> definitely worth a 10-15% increase in cost. The additional horsepower makes them far faster, the larger screens are easier on the eyes, more apps will run over the next 2 years, and the list goes on. Why should you pay $2000 for an inferior experience?

The “free” phones aren’t free, they’re just locking you into an expensive, 2 year contract. I would either a) spend $200 more to get the iPhone 6 which is 2 generations newer and going to last you far longer before it gets old and creaky or b) switch to a pay by the month plan, save $40 a month and use some of the nearly $1000 you’ll save to buy a $350 Nexus 5 or $650 iPhone 6.

iPhone user here, and I’d go for the Galaxy. There are a ton of phones using the android platform, but if you go Apple, you are totally locked into Apple.

I’d pay to upgrade to the iPhone 6, the 5s is seriously outdated (it’s internals are worse than iPhone 5). Think how bad it would be in two years, $200 is just a quarter a day if you look at it over the length of your contract…

The Galaxy IV is less obselete, but samsungs are a lot worse than the specs would suggest.

Are those your only two choices?

Hah! Galaxy S4 user here. I’m due for a new phone in February and will likely switch over to the Apple6. I love the Samsung I’m using, but since my gf and I both have iPads, and her company phone is an Apple6 it just makes sense.

I asked a friend who is a tech writer how people decide which phone to get. He showed me an article he wrote that said “camera quality” is more important than phone call clarity!

GalaxyS4 user here and (full disclosure) anti-Apple for the most part:

I’ve been android since literally the first Droid came out. I’ve had good phones (Droid, RAZR) bad phones (Charge…kill me), but this phone has been the best of the bunch. Reliable, fast, portable, plenty of space for music and apps.

I’ll grant you that facetime capabilities would be neat with it, but if you have tech savvy parents/friends who can just download Google Hangouts you can do video chatting there…or Skype.

The only downside is that sometimes the Google Maps app will decide to be a dick and magically not find signal (I’m only in the biggest city in North Carolina…) but other than that I’m loving it!

Between those two, I’d choose the S4 because it’s bigger. Size is a virtue when it comes to smartphones, which is something that’s not entirely obvious until you’re using it all the time.

Also, if you like the idea of being an android geek, then get the Samsung, and if you don’t like it you just grit your teeth for 2 years and then get an iPhone 8 or whatever is all the rage then. Then at least you’ll know.

The contracts are not always such a bad deal. Here’s my options with and without a contract:

Verizon Iphone6 64GB (my current phone) – $300 with 2 year contract
Service with 2GB data – $60/month

Straight Talk Iphone6 16GB – $650 (I don’t see a 64GB option, but I presume you could buy one anywhere for about $750)
Pay-by-the-month service with unlimited data – $45/month

So you save about $15/month and get unlimited data by going with Straight Talk. Over two years your savings will add up to $360. At Verizon, you could have paid $300 for the phone, and $360 more over the life of the contract and paid essentially the same amount as the 16GB phone with straight talk. The contract is the better deal.

In all seriousness, there’s something wrong with Apple if the iPhone 5s is no longer usable in two years. Other than internal storage - which shouldn’t be too much of an issue with an SD card - there’s not that much difference between a three year old smartphone and a new one.

I just got a Sony Xperia Z3, after briefly test driving an HTC One M8 and Nexus 6. None of the three is a significant upgrade over the Nexus 4 I just retired. In fact, if the phone itself wasn’t so badly beaten up (more particularly, if it didn’t have the indescribably stupid glass backplate which made it fall off everything I put it down on), and it had an SD slot, I could quite happily have gone on using it for another three years.

Obviously, the cameras are better, the screens are larger, and the processors faster, but you don’t notice any of that in 99% of everyday use. Honestly, the only really noticeable upgrades in the Xperia are the SD slot and the battery life.

If you’ve already decided on your provider then I would go with the iphone simply because sticking to one platform tends to keep things simpler in the long run.

If not, then be realistic about what you’re looking for. An oversimplified analogy would be comparing the iPhone to riding a bus vs the android as driving a car; they’re both going to get you where you’re going, it just depends on if you want a say in how you get there or not.

As far as options, if you haven’t already set your mind on a provider then you could stand to benefit from broadening your choices. The Nexus series devices are going to benefit from running vanilla Android, though the 6 may be a bit large. As its been previously stated, bringing your own device into a contract can net you some substantial savings over time, though being able to go contract-less is its own benefit.

As for data use, you can end up paying for much more than you need. I use data every day since I work in the IT OSS field, I hardly break 2gb/month in personal data usage. Depending on the carrier, it can be fairly simple to scale your data monthly depending on your expected use. AT&T makes it simple to change in their app.

Republic Wireless is a great provider to consider if you live in one of their service areas since the plans are unbeatable in price. The downside being the phone choices and signal reliability in remote areas that most budget providers seem to suffer. I would drop my contract in a heartbeat to get with them if it were a viable option.

The OP mentioned the 5c, not the 5s. The 5C is basically the 5 on the inside, with plastic on the outside. Also, it only comes in 8GB these days, and there’s no SD card slot.

Oops.

On further research, it looks like no iPhone takes SD cards. Tsk.

Thanks everyone! I really appreciate all the advice and words of wisdom.

I understand what everyone’s been saying about being locked into a two-year contract. My family is going all-in on a family plan together, which has its own pitfalls but does seem like it will save money for us in the end, and my hope is that I don’t really need the latest bells and whistles. (See also: getting a smartphone for the first time in 2015! Let’s face it, I’m not used to having the latest bells and whistles for my personal tech.) If I do need them… well… both the iPhone 5c and Galaxy S4 came out in 2013. Is it seriously the case that the lifetime of these things is less than three years?! (…that was a rhetorical question. I know, I know. I do work in a tech field. But eh. My seven-year-old laptop is a pain to use for anything requiring processing power, but I can still use it!)

I am really leaning towards the Galaxy, if only because I can put in an SD card and buy extra batteries! But we have another issue which I hadn’t thought about when I posted last night, which is that since we act as tech support for my parents, one of us (either my husband or me) needs to get an iPhone. (“Needs” in the sense that my parents are overseeing this whole thing. Obviously, we could break out and do our own thing, but then I wouldn’t be asking quite this set of questions, I wouldn’t necessarily be locking into a contract, etc.)

So new question for you guys, which I know a couple of you have touched on already: how much easier is it for two phones in a household to be in the same “ecosystem” vs. different ones?

You have twice as many chargers, or at least twice as many charging cables, as you would otherwise. Other than that it’s not an issue in my house. It was actually slightly more complicated when both my wife and I had iPhones because some apps were under her account and some were under mine, and having multiple devices for different people with the same iTunes installation got to be a pain sometimes. Now that we’re on separate devices, she’s got her stuff and I’ve got my stuff and it all works out OK.

Thanks steronz! I hadn’t thought about that, but yeah, dueling iTunes could be a problem. This was helpful.

So… I am now the owner of a Galaxy S4, and my husband of an iPhone 5c, and after an hour of playing with both phones (and my parents, who have been periodically been getting us to troubleshoot) I think this was absolutely the right decision, I’m very taken with the Galaxy, but we also have the comfort of the iPhone to fall back on if necessary.

I thought pretty hard about getting an S5 (it turns out, to no one’s surprise, that my mom was wrong about the details of the plan, and we did end up paying for the phones in the end), but in the end… well… I’m the sort of person who does lose my phone, so I figure no point in paying extra for getting the latest and greatest when I’m at risk for that.

Get the free app Android Lost! With it installed you can control every feature on your phone via virtually any other internet connected device. We just used the alarm feature last week to locate my wife’s phone, which had somehow gotten buried in a pile of clothes to be donated. You can also go online to the Android Lost site and, so long as the phone is on and the battery is not dead, “push” the app to your phone if you happpen to lose it before you get to the app store!