Well not doing the test drive but I've owned many an iphone, recent phone history (org iphone 3g, 3s, 4,
SG3, 5,
Nexus 5, 6,
SG 6) Had the iphone 6 from November to June and recently traded it with someone else for a SG6 and cash).
- Be prepared for a learning curve play with the phone a lot to give it a fair chance. Nice thing about Samsung is that it's an Android phone with a physical home button still and has some functions similar to an iphone.
- Try some launchers because touch wiz is ugly and icons look too big. I suggest Nova Launcher as a starting launcher and try some icon themes out.
- You will learn to love the back arrow. It may annoy you at first but once you get used to it being at the bottom of your phone so you don't have to stretch top left you'll love it.
A breakdown of most used functions by most people
Google now vs siri.
Pro: Google now is faster and tends to get better search results
Con: I find Siri is maybe a bit better of an assistant, sending and reading messages to you in a car especially better than I've experience with the S6 and android.
Result: Tie
iMessage vs Hangouts
Pro Hangouts is available multiplatform so most people can have it.
Con: iMessage is more fully fuctional, has more features and one I really like is grouping all the photos that have been in a chat if you want to see or save one. Although both apps can be used on a computer hangouts cannot currently do sms over the computer and iMessage is ios only.
Result: iMessage more so if you own a mac.
Notifications
Pretty tough to beat Android on this. iOs made big leaps to catch up and now have actionable notifications. It's still nice to have the little icons of the type of notification on your status bar though. Also I find the ios two tab notification drop down clunky and inefficient. I'm also still baffled why half the time I look at the day view and want to know the current temperature it only tells me conditions but not the temp. If Apple ever goes back to a simple ios 6 notification drop down it would be a tougher call. I miss the stock ticker and weather widget from those days.
Result: Android
Camera
I actually like the iphone camera functionality and simplicity more and I think the iphone took slightly more pleasing pictures to my eye but it's pretty much a dead heat.
Result: edge iPhone
What sets Android apart?
Customization: I like things clean and astheticly pleasing. I find paper design is a bit nicer looking than ios. I like being able to have uniform looking icons, Nice large clock and weather widget on my main page for quick viewing. Row's of icons seem like a waste of space since most people only use a few consistently
Set your default apps: You can set default apps if you have a prefered browser, email app, music app etc you can set it on Android and that's what it will open by default. As far as I can remember apple and siri will always use the apple app.
Navigating the phone (efficiency): Bottom back arrow > then top left arrow. Placing icons on the bottom of your pages easy to reach > top left icon auto arrange and double home button tap to bring down to open. These may not sound like a big deal until you get used to it and go back to a larger iphone model and you notice how annoying it is to be reaching up all the time with one hand use or wasting time having to double tap.
Conclusion
I'm not biased towards Android definitely not a FANDROID type of user. I'm a tech enthusiast that actually have generally preferred Apple products in the past but find they are losing a bit of focus lately. I notice a lot more bugs in software releases these days and it seems like they are focusing a lot more on features (especially those they profit on like using icloud space and music) than improving functionality. I'd prefer to own an iphone but until they improve some of these little things I'll hang on to my S6.
