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As my name might indicate, I'm an Apple fan. Recently, my iPhone of 2 years broke when I was replacing the battery. With no backup phone, I was left with one option (I was not going a week without a mobile device) - buy a temporary phone while I repaired my damaged iPhone.
Not wanting to buy an iPhone at their selling price, I opted to buy a cheap Samsung Galaxy, the S3 Mini (GT-i8200N). For £80, it seemed like a decent phone on the box, and looked promising as a backup phone.
Oh, how I was wrong.
After starting the annoying setup phase of the phone, which continued to ask me for Samsung/Google account info, I realized that I had entered several details incorrectly. I hit the return key, to find it wouldn't let me return to the previous menu. Hmm. Reboot incoming.
After rebooting and
finally setting the phone up, I was met with the launcher, some witchcraft called TouchWiz. I have honestly never used such a terrible application in all my life. Laggy and unresponsive, I found myself waiting a lot for the phone (albeit I put that down to the specs of the phone). The keyboard was slow and useless for my needs. I also found that mobile data kept enabling itself, which didn't impress me. I also found that after spending £80, the phone was locked to a network, and unlocking it was going to cost an additional £20. I'm still waiting for that to process.
I managed to root it pretty quickly and found myself in a world of Chinese applications. Assuming it was an application installed by the rooting application. After a swift reboot, I found that TouchWiz was deciding not to work. Hmm. At this point, the phone entered a drawer for a good day or so.
I came back to the phone, ready to attempt a restore (something I'd never done on a non-Apple device) and found that Kies was a horrible program; very much a rip off of iTunes in the UI dept. and seemingly useless and confusing when it come to restoring. This was getting painful. I eventually found instructions on Odin and Download Mode.
Odin, I must say, gets the biggest credit from me. The fact you can flash custom ROMs and recovery systems is a huge plus over Apple; I'd love to be able to do similar things to an iPhone (then I remember that's not allowed for obvious reasons). Anyway, I flashed Phillz Recovery to it, and ended up reflashing the stock firmware after finding that CyanogenMod doesn't actually support the GT-i8200N. Back to that horrible setup wizard.
Anyway, I got a good weeks use out of the phone, and I now have my iPhone back and I've genuinely never been happier to have a phone that can actually keep up with me and my needs. I'd honestly consider switching to an Android device, but only if it was a decent phone; I wouldn't mind one of the Note series, or an S5/S6 (when launched).
[tl;dr] Bought a Samsung when my iPhone broke, chose the worst phone in the world then broke that too. Would consider buying a
better Android device but not a cheap one again.