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Comment by czhiddy | Hacker News Reader

Why? Because they spend a fortune on advertising.

Anyone who's used a S3/S4 knows most of the S-"features" are pure gimmicks that a fairly competent engineer could implement in less than a week. HTC phones are much more sturdy and better designed, IMO.

I was vacationing in Hong Kong earlier this month, and the subway stations were just completely plastered with various 15-foot tall Galaxy posters. Some of the features they were promoting were just laughable - simultaneous photos with the front and back camera composed into a picture-in-picture result? Really?

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Who cares about the gimmicks?

Samsung galaxy s phones have generally good hardware compared to the competition as well as a few really important hardware features which their competitors don't have (all of the features at once, that is): 4g lte support, a removable battery, and (for me the deal(maker||breaker)) an SD card slot. Those aren't just gimmicks. They're real differences. Many people like me really care.

I couldn't care less about the default software - there are a wide range of roms which address most (unfortunately not all for super picky people like myself) issues you might have.

>> simultaneous photos with the front and back camera composed into a picture-in-picture result?

I really wanted this feature for a long time and wondered why phones that had 2 cameras did not allow it.

It was specially useful when taking photos of my 1 year old daughter. It helps capture our emotions at the same time we were capturing her. So now you can see photos where she is trying to learn walking and at the same time see my face that is at times smiling (when she walks couple of steps) and at times scared (when she is about to fall) in the photos.

The only way being shown someones baby photos could get any more awkward and annoying

Now I have to make sure both sides of the photo look good before taking one.

While I agree that Samsung phones have quite a mishmash of features just for the heck of it, I think the picture in picture feature is quite nice and is something the competition (especially Apple) would heavily advertise had they come up with it themselves.

S-Voice. lol. It almost feels like they had a handwritten rules-based speech to text.

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