iPhone 5 versus Samsung Galaxy SIII - Why I Went With iPhone

Tim, my youngest son, both upgraded to the new iPhone 5 this past Saturday.  Tim went with the 32GB and I went with the 64GB. 

I hesitated going to the iPhone 5 because of the great things I read about the Samsung Galaxy SIII and Android being an open platform.  I also hesitated because of Mike Briggs post on, "8 Reasons Why I Hate My iPhone 5".   Having tremendous amount of respect for Mike, this caused me great pause.  I spoke to many individuals who switched from the iPhone to  Samsung Galaxy SIII .   Then Mike wrote a follow up post, titled "8 Reasons Why I Love My iPhone 5".  At first, I thought this was going to be a tongue-in-cheek type of post, but Mike has changed his point of view with some great points.

What really caused me to go to an iPhone 5 was all the benchmarks of the iPhone 5 versus the Samsung Galaxy SIII.   In every single benchmark the iPhone 5 was faster.  This is important to me as I tend to quickly check things on my iPhone and do not need the bigger screen that the Samsung has.   Having 130 iPhone apps was less of an issue, but not a non concern.

I have had it five days now and I am very impressed.  The quality is tremendous.  The battery life is very impressive.  Google put their maps back on iTunes which is a great thing.  Siri is better than I thought if you stick with the basics.  The best quote on the iPhone 5 was Tim the other night, "this is almost too fast" he said half jokingly.

Moving from an iPhone 4 running 6.0.1 to an iPhone 5 running 6.0.1 was painless.  I do encrypt my backups so that I do not have to re-enter any login/password information after I upgrade.  I nearly did a big FUBAR when I encrypted my iPhone backup (a different password than your phone of course) and nearly forgot which of my 8 "standard" haystacked passwords that I used.  That would have been a big D'OH, but I got it on my third attempt.  I was almost at capacity with my 32GB iPhone 4, so the total process was a few hours, but there were no problems.  

I picked up a nice bumper as well the Photive Hybrid iPhone 5 Bumper Case - Black. Designed for The New iPhone 5. Updated Lightning Port Cutout for $9.95.

Most interesting to me is the speed difference between LTE and WiFi as illustrated below:

 

 I run the full WPA-2 security here at home and that accounts for some of the slow speed.  I never thought in 2012 I would just turn off WiFi because it was slower on my phone.

I sold my iPhone 4s on Gazelle for $149.  I should have sold them last week when they were paying $165.   The sales almost paid for my iPhone 5 which was nice.