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The thing is that every new phone, if the hardware manufacturers are doing their jobs, will leapfrog the previous generation. So yeah, the S8, which came out will after the iPhone 7, should have a better camera. Blah. Compare apples to apples, the same generation of phone, then come back to me. I can't help but look at the Android phones and think why does Android need so much more hardware (processors and ram) than the iPhone and is still slower and less stable than iOS..
 
But that isn't true. You don't see head to head match ups pitting the latest and greatest of one with the soon-to-be retired product of another. It's a pointless read. Now if the product is old like a Canon 7D but still current and not slated for an update then, sure, pit it against the Nikon D500. But everyone knows the iPhone 7 isn't long for this world. No one would recommend buying one right now unless you really needed a new phone and you wanted to stick with iOS. But someone buying a new phone from scratch? No, they aren't buying last year's phone. That's silly. That is why this match up is silly. They might as well put up a headline: "Amazing discovery 2+2 confirmed at equalling 4."

So you would rather them wait until the iPhone 8 (or whatever it will be called) comes out then compare it to Samsung's 6-month old (by then) offering rather than compare the new Samsung to the now 6-month old iPhone 7? Can you see how silly that sounds?

There is *never* an opportunity to compare exactly equivalent devices when the release dates are staggered by six months. So by reviewing now, they potentially disadvantage the iPhone; if they reviewed in October, they'd potentially disadvantage the Samsung.

CR reviews and compares what devices are available *now*, not at some mythical point in the future.
 
This article really should have waited until the new iPhone was announced. however, I just picked up the red edition iphone and I have now sold 5 of them to others and a couple of switchers.
 
Does anyone seriously believe Apple would release the iPhone 7S and 7S Plus... and then release the iPhone 8 the SAME day?! Effectively killing sales of the 7S and 7S Plus since the average consumer will just go with the latest number. The Apple I know will not release the 7S and the 8 at the same time, or even the same year. I don't know why people keep pretending they will.
 
Sorry, but I have to call BS on this being a troll post. Maybe you can link to a video which demonstrates ANY of the claims you say. In terms of third party applications, that can happen on any system. In terms of general UI freezes or issues with any of the default apps including the camera... show me. I call BS.

 
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Form should be secondary to function. iOS still has a slight lead in that regard.

In some scenarios. In others it's miles behind. Even with files, file management in Android is better. Music syncing on Android without further payments is hugely easier. Notifications work significantly better on Android than iOS. You don't have to tolerate arbitrary content censorship because you can sideload apps. Fast app switching with one key on Android is an amazing bit of UI that's incredibly useful. Joining new wi-fi networks or picking between multiple ones is significantly easier and more functional on Android. Maps are more functional on Android by default because, well, Apple Maps. Android devices still have a 3.5mm headphone jack. On Android you can buy e-books/comics/other digital content directly in applications without anyone taking a cut (and in real terms that means I can buy Kindle/Comixology books directly in the app on an Android device, rather than the ludicrous and ****** user experience Apple forces me into with the in-app purchase description).

It will always vary for different users, but it feels like the aggregate is about 50/50 to me now.
 
Leading in design? So, bc they release their Galaxy S(X) models earlier in the year than Apple does they’re “leading in design”?

There have been rumors that Apple has been working on this design since the 6S came out, so it’s not like Samsung magically came up with this and now Apple must respond!!!

Samsung made a phone with no side bezels and less top bezels...the back design of the phone is hot garbage. Cool I guess?

I do think there is a difference between talking about it and actually doing it. Apple talked about it (at least there was a rumor about it) and Samsung actually did it. Doing actually speaks a lot louder and means a lot more. There is no reason that Apple waited except that is what they usually do or they couldn't make the new design work any quicker.
 
I have no comment on this one. I have lost my trust on Consumer Report. I missed the good ol' Consumer Report back in the 90's...

It's interesting that all these people who find reasons that the comparison is a bad one (because the iPhone LOST)...I wonder how this thread would have panned out if CR had found the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus superior? Still think they'd be screaming "meaningless review"?

No doubt they're both fine phones. Pick the one you like.
 
"Even though the fingerprint scanner on the back of the S8 worked well, the report also described it as "awkwardly placed," explaining that they had to constantly poke around to find it and normally smudged the camera lens while doing so."

LOL

And a tent-pole feature, Bixby, is not even working! And they put a button on the phone for it!

And what about all the duplicate carrier and Samsung apps trying to compete with the standard Google apps. What a mess

CR is a joke
You seem angry my friend.. let it out.... go on, you will feel better...
 
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This is a non-rating rating.

You are comparing hardware specs and to some extent performance and value on two different OSes that optimize and use hardware differently.

Since you can't run either OS on either handset, the comparison is rather useless beyond a spec for spec, hardware feature, and price comparison.
 
No taste? Put a Galaxy S8 or S8+ next to an iPhone 7 (especially a 7 Plus) and you tell me which one has a more "tasteful" design. Sorry but the iPhone 7 looks outdated and not very stylish next to the S8.
"Tasteful" design.
Why reviews even include design is beyond me. How design is perceived by each individual is subject to their personal opinion as to what appeals to them.
SUVs for instances are very similar though I much prefer the look of the Sorento over the RAV4.
Pets appearances vary wildly and people will say their dog is so ugly he is cute. That doesn't even make sense.
How a phone looks is one of the first things people notice, if not the first thing. There is no need for the reviewer to assert their personal bias to its quality of design. It is just hubris to think their personal view of what is good design is the one and only right view. Include a picture/image of what is reviewed and leave the "tasteful" design decision to the reader.
 
Sorry, but I have to call BS on this being a troll post. Maybe you can link to a video which demonstrates ANY of the claims you say. In terms of third party applications, that can happen on any system. In terms of general UI freezes or issues with any of the default apps including the camera... show me. I call BS.
That's iOS 7.0, just after the huge redesign which is relatively notable for it's instability. If you're having that many issues you should try resetting all settings or setting up as new.
 
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But that isn't true. You don't see head to head match ups pitting the latest and greatest of one with the soon-to-be retired product of another. It's a pointless read. Now if the product is old like a Canon 7D but still current and not slated for an update then, sure, pit it against the Nikon D500. But everyone knows the iPhone 7 isn't long for this world. No one would recommend buying one right now unless you really needed a new phone and you wanted to stick with iOS. But someone buying a new phone from scratch? No, they aren't buying last year's phone. That's silly. That is why this match up is silly. They might as well put up a headline: "Amazing discovery 2+2 confirmed at equalling 4."
I'm going to go out on a limb. You didn't read the source article. Apparently, it was a pointless read or you have a completely different definition of what a comparison is.:rolleyes: In no way, shape, or form is this a comparison or match up. In that entire article the iPhone is mentioned in exactly 1 sentence and that sentence also references the LG G6. 1 sentence a comparison does not make. Kinda makes your argument moot. Sorry.
 
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The Samsung phone is a very nice phone, the iPhone is a very nice phone, Consumer reports is a very bad publication.

I used to read them about 15 years ago. Seriously, back then there were not as many online reviews or word of mouth. These days, they're just a demonstration that an overly regimented method of evaluation produces a lot of shortcomings. They tend to discount usability, reliability, and convenience and overstate specifications that have less real-world meaning. At some point, I noticed that all their recommendations were worse than what I could find reading online reviews (after buying a few of their "recommendations" that had annoying shortcomings).
 
Queue the comments against Consumer Reports:
  1. "Does Consumer Reports even exist anymore"?
  2. "Consumer Reports is not what it was in the last century."
  3. "Consumer Reports ... <snark comment>"
Amusing, because Consumer Reports is vendor-neutral, and their evaluations, which you might disagree with, are driven by engineering and not driven by vendors' contributions -- direct or indirect.

Are they perfect? Absolutely, not. Far from it.

Being self-sustaining by their subscribers, Consumer Reports does have lapses that one has to account for:

No long-term testing under normal daily use.

This applies mostly to cars, which have to be sold immediately after testing due to obvious reasons, forcing Consumer Reports to rely on their subscribers' yearly questionnaires, which might be biased. (Example: Will the owner of a Tesla ever say that their mechanicals or electronics are troublesome?)

Ratings may lag between products tested and new competitive products by several months.
This leads to cases of unequal ratings between new and older products, such as the S8 and iPhone(s). And, sometimes the products rated are no longer available.

However, when buying a car, a kitchen appliance, a mattress, etc. I check Consumer Reports to provide initial, but not final, guidance.

But that is just me.

Disclaimer: I have no personal relationship with Consumer Reports -- just a subscriber.
 
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I love my S8+

iPhone's camera color is better than Samsung's though. I've been doing photography for a long time and think Samsung's picture color is way too artificial.

The fingerprint sensor isn't in an awkward place. You get used to it really fast. I don't even think about it now.

Otherwise, it's an excellent phone. Amazing battery life. I love the symmetrical front, which the iPhone 8 doesn't have (has that camera bezel on top that doesn't match the bottom).
 
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Those phones are nice designs, but or me, its still about the OS and iOS is superior overall.

I think Samsung makes nice hardware and Android OS has made a lot of strides these last few years. They have a lot of features I can really appreciate.

But nothing can pry me away with iOS. It's the best experience I have had when I switched from Android years ago and it Continually improves with security and efficiency. That wins me over even hardware.
 
The S8 camera seems to add color thats not even visible in the actual scene. I prefer iPhone's realistic pictures even though they may not look as spruced up.

That is true, the color as over saturated on the S8 and a lot of phones. But most people prefer that because they look "better" and can be posted directly online.

I don't want that because most of my pictures from any of my cameras are run through lightroom and/or Photoshop before I post or print them.
 
This is kinda weird cause in MKBHD's comparison the S8 consistently had one of the worse looking pictures. Mainly due to white balance and saturation levels. I didn't like some of the iPhone pictures either just saying. The Pixel was killer.
 
Poor stability of iOS? Can you explain further?
Actually, I think iOS could stand a special focus put onto fixing things, similar to the "Snow Leopard"/"Mountain Lion" iterations that macOS got.

I generally see iOS today as much more capable, but often less stable, than it was in the past (admittedly some of this may involve rose-colored glasses). And I'll start this by saying I'm using an iPhone 6 that has a ridiculous number of apps on it, but that shouldn't matter. Here are some problems:

UI Responsiveness: Part of Apple's original "contract", for the UI on the iPhone was that it must be responsive to user input at all times - you could take away the physical keyboard/buttons if their virtual replacements always registered (and indicated that they registered) taps immediately, so do whatever was necessary to make that work and then use the remaining resources / CPU time to do the requested tasks (phone calls, rendering web pages, whatever). Yet there are far too many times now where iOS will go non-responsive to user input for (admittedly very brief) times - I'm not saying everything on the phone has to happen instantly, obviously, simply that the UI has to take priority, even if that means other things take longer to finish.

For example, if I hit the Home button on my iPhone, and it says, "hang on a moment, I'm busy finishing this calculation/lookup/garbage collection", this is a sign that iOS is broken, because part of the underlying contract is, "pay attention to user input above all else, and 'Home' means go to the main menu NOW". Just as, on a Unix machine, if I can write code that panics the OS (leaving aside, possibly, some esoteric test programs), the fix is not, "well, don't run that program", it's an indication that the OS is broken, because part of the underlying contract of the OS is, "must stay up and running at all times / don't allow user code to crash the OS".

Context loss: My PalmPilot, many years ago, ran lots of apps, and gave the satisfactory illusion that they were all running simultaneously (they were not) by handling context nearly flawlessly - apps saved their context when switching away, and when you came back things were always in exactly the same state as when you left. And it did this with kilobytes of storage. Now, on iOS, with gigabytes of storage, if I'm writing a response in one Safari browser tab, and open a new tab to look up a URL, when I close the new tab and return to the first tab, there's a decent chance that Safari will reload the web page from scratch, throwing out paragraphs of text that I've written. As another example, switching out from a long-running out-and-about game like Ingress or PokemonGO to the camera to take one snapshot, or to Safari to quickly look something up, invariably means that the game will reload from scratch when you come back a moment later. This is very poor behavior, and in the Safari-losing-text cases, it's quite infuriating. I'm annoyed that I have to learn to carefully step around these landmines rather than them being considered showstopping errors and getting fixed.

A myriad of other small problems: mostly UI glitches (too many places where they've clearly handled the most likely case at the expense of others rather than properly handling all cases)... here are two that annoy me daily (not necessarily the biggest problems or most in need of fixing, just examples that stand out):

1. Text selection still has a bunch of infuriating edge cases. Far too many times, on iOS, I've tried to select part of a sentence or two out of a paragraph, and after a certain amount of text is selected, iOS goes all Clippy on me, like this:
iOS: "Oh, I see you're trying to select a paragraph, here, let me help!"
Me: "No! Thanks, but I really just want this sentence and a half..."
iOS: "No, no, I'm sure you want this whole paragraph, here you go! You're welcome!"
Me: "Here, let me just narrow the selection a little..."
iOS: "Nope, you get a paragraph, I SAID YOU'RE WELCOME!"
Me: "Ugh, okay... fine, I was going to just cut this and paste it in a new place but I guess I'll go paste the whole paragraph at the new location and trim it down there to the part I wanted to move and then come back here and delete that part from the old location, and then scroll back to the new location again."​

2. A specific case in the App Store (yes, I know it's getting replaced, this is still a concrete example of a long-standing bug). I manually go click the "Update" buttons on apps in the App Store, because I want to read the release notes. On the iPhone, you can tap on an app's icon in the update list to get to the store page for that app (with reviews, screenshots, etc.). But if you tap on the app icon while the phone is busy (see UI Responsiveness, above), often it won't switch right away, or give any other indication that the tap has registered (see UI Responsiveness, above), causing you to tap again, when in fact, it is adding the taps to a queue of pending actions. When the UI gets control again, you get the bizarre behavior of it switching from "Updates" to the app page, ... then from "Updates" to the app page (again), then ... from "Updates" to the app page (again)... yeah. And then, when you tap the "<Updates" button up in the corner of the app page to go back to the list-of-updates page, it takes you ... back to that same app page, the same number of times, before finally returning to the "Updates" page. This is ... it's User Interface 101, it's not some obscure edge case that could never happen, it's the result of the code (and programmers) making too many assumptions about what is going on, and only handling the Happy Path.
 
Sorry, but I have to call BS on this being a troll post. Maybe you can link to a video which demonstrates ANY of the claims you say. In terms of third party applications, that can happen on any system. In terms of general UI freezes or issues with any of the default apps including the camera... show me. I call BS.

You think I would ever take my time to help someone like you, the irony of your post - imagine an Android user posting all that nonsense you just spouted. Also how is the phone, camera or safari browser 3rd party applications? Also, what do I have to gain with trolling or spouting BS exactly, I've been here since 2012, bought numerous Apple products and may do so in the future yet.

You carry on cheer leading Apple, even when they make errors or mistakes, and you can count on them not being fixed.

Not to mention, the issues I face are already documented online and others already experience it, it isn't an isolated issue that I made up.

https://www.igeeksblog.com/iphone-6-6-plus-camera-freezes/

https://www.igeeksblog.com/phone-app-freezes-on-iphone/

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204229

(there are hundreds of threads on various websites - you can find the video links yourself with a bit of searching)

To note - the fixes don't work for everyone - some bugs have over time been fixed by Apple (e.g. the camera one I no longer experience, but I experienced it for a long time as did my wife), although new ones crop up. I did not experience this level of instability during my 4S days.

EDIT: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ery-life-issues.1265451/page-12#post-13761180 So you are able to post about a software bug you experienced, but when I do, I am a troll?
 
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I haven't had a phone with a major shortcoming since the Galaxy Note 2.

The ONLY reason I went back to the iPhone was that I live in iWork and iTunes. Besides, Apple's ecosystem exists and functions, while Google's Android was acceptable, I always found myself having to pick up third party software or hardware to get things to work. The solutions used to work for a time (such as Double Twist to get iTunes music into Android) but would start to suffer after some time.

I was happy with the Note 2, but the iPhone 6+ gave me what I needed: an iPhone with a useable screen size and the iOS ecosystem. The seven looks great, especially the Product RED version, and I'm sure the eight will look superb as well ... but I haven't needed anything beyond what I have with the 6+
 
No matter what hardware Samsung creates, the software is never up to snuff. Samsung is getting better, but they're ideology is to create a buffet of features, rather than focus on making each feature viable.


For this, any Samsung phone released is inferior for my usage compared to any iPhone, old or new.

Consumer Reports is unbiased, but their recommended products are often inferior to others ranked lower in their charts.

I prefer the Amazon approach. If there's a lot of good reviews, it's usually a good product. I am rarely disappointed with highly rated Amazon purchases.
 
I have the 7+ and S8 as my work and personal phones. I live in fear of the front and back of the S8 cracking. I live in fear of how much information Google is obtaining about me with the S8. I actually trust Apple. Google, not at all.
 
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