Nah, the camera is really great, you may want to dial back saturation under settings (depending on the lighting, etc). Check out the images thread here, nothing blurry there (except maybe my quick and dirty drive by snap, lol), and Sense does not take 500 MB of the 680 available.
I will going with the Chameleon rom, to get my buttons my way, and then applying any of viper's mods by hand, then debloating.
I was fully prepared to return this to go with the SGS3 if I was in any way unhappy, but the unhappies I have are too minor and too easily addressed.
The screen is simply amazing. Calls are crystal clear. Impromptu snaps of the family are absolutely fabulous.
The multitasking woes can be dealt with.
And all screens will scratch easily with the right sand - the active ingredient in sandpaper and sandblasters, very little can stand against sand.
Thanks for the wonderfully encouraging response! With a custom ROM, debloat, memfree tweaked defaults, and eventually zram-enabled kernels -- especially with multitasking increasingly looking like a conditional bug in some handsets under certain conditions -- I'm quite heartened.
On further inspection, it seems all of the LTE's shortcomings can be fixed in software (save for battery replacement, which is a non-issue for me; in fact, I can't count the number of times I dropped a phone mid-call just to have the battery pop out, sometimes corrupting data). Even the internal storage 'shortcoming' can be mitigated with my 32 (and soon, 64/128GB) microSD[H/X]C card.
Samsung's shortcomings compared to the LTE (flimsier plastic design, gimmicky TouchWiz UI, lack of kickstand or shutter button, hideous PenTile + blue tint + 300%LCD power white pixels) aren't nearly so easily overcome, however. When you get down to it, a phone is made up of its hardware and software, and in both respects the LTE wins hands-down (save for the Sense multitasking glitch which I'm confident will be fixed/worked around soon enough).
In sum, to compensate for the few GS3 specs it falls short of, the LTE simply needs software tweak(s) and an SD card. However, to compete with the LTE where the GS3 falls short, the Sammy would need a whole new screen technology devoid of PenTile, inaccurate blue-tinted colors, or black-creep; an entirely new metallic/solid outer chassis; a glue-on kickstand (or one integrated in some bulky case); a hardwired camera button glued onto the side; and a driver-level UI overhaul (either Sense or "senseless," anything not taking a "touch-whizz" on the user experience). See, it's harder for the SGS3 to live up to its pitfalls with respect to the LTE than vice versa.
At the end of the day, the LTE as a multimedia phone seems the better (and sturdier) choice with a more accurate screen -- both in terms of color and effective resolution, where its 1050x590 effective dimensions take 300% of LCD's power to render white regions of equivalent size and relative luminance (that's organic diode tech for ya) -- white remains the vast majority of the internet, by the way, especially for mobile sites.
The SGS3, thanks to PenTile, has an effective pixel density nearly identical to last generation's Evo 3D (259 vs 256ppi). This is
not cool, especially since I can make out the 3D's pixels easily enough when zoomed out. Compare that to the LTE's screen with an incredible 312ppi. That's close to retina display (326ppi) level, folks, spread out over 4.7 inches, with accurate colors to boot.
Coupled with Samsung's shoddy history with GPS and radios (despite great whitepaper tech specs in the chipset) and patchy customer service (repairs, pushing updates, etc) since the Galaxy S (1)...not a
Rosie picture. True, neither of these points are yet substantiated in regards to the S3, but history just may be worth more than a grain of salt. HTC certainly isn't flawless in either arena itself, but at the very least this isn't a point in Sammy's favor.
