After this morning’s existential crisis over which phone to buy, I bit the bullet and upgraded to a Samsung Galaxy S3. I’d have to say I’m pleasantly surprised.

Here’s what I like about it:
– Jelly Bean is amazing. The device was preinstalled with bloatware. There was even a Yellow Pages app. Fortunately it’ pretty straight forward to root the device and make it run how Google intended for it to run.
– Deep Google integration. My life is in-sync in ways I never imagined it would be. In particular, I’m pointing at contacts and browser settings. Plus there’s a Gmail app. Plus there’s a dedicated Google Reader app.
– The hardware. Applications load and respond faster, LTE stands for “light speed”, and I’m quite enjoying the haptic feedback. The dedicated back button is nice too, although takes getting used too.

Here’s what I’m still not sure about:
– The form factor. The S3 is difficult to maneuver at times with one hand, and seems to always want two.
– Battery life. It could be worse than my old iPhone 4, which would be bad.
– Some of the UX decisions. I haven’t decided as to whether they’re bad, or just a different paradigm than iOS. Keyboard layout, auto-complete, and copy and paste come to mind most immediately.
– The apps. It’s obvious that some, like Evernote, may have actually been designed for Android first and then ported over to iOS. Others, I may or may not be looking at you Remember the Milk, are the awkward younger siblings. Like really awkward. Although the situation is probably a lot better now than it was at the beginning.

We’ll see if this decision sticks, or whether I go crying back to iOS.

P.S. The lists aren’t properly formatted because I didn’t want to take the time to manually type each HTML tag. WordPress for Android could use love too.