Originally posted by TheUnkn0wn
Plastic is what saves your phone when you drop it. The HTC One's camera isn't up to the S4's standard and it doesn't have a microSD card slot (which I highly recommend), and the iPhone 5? Forget it. buying it will just make you another statistic in Apples marketing office. What more does the the iPhone 5 bring to the table that the iPhone 4 didn't 3 years ago. It's a nice looking phone and that's all I have to say for it.
You could say what does the S4 bring to the table that the S3 doesn't. Quite frankly I don't care about all the gimmicks that I will never use (Eye-Scrolling, Media Sharing etc...) because buying an Android phone means you can customize it (including the OS that's on it). So the only thing that will have Samsung written on it is the case itself and the OS will be that of Googles own vision of what Android is meant to be, which will be a more functional and elegant user experience than anything the competitors have to offer.
So my conclusion is, buy the phone with the best specification (which currently happens to be the S4) since that's what makes it different from the phones last year, that's the thing that you're paying for and lastly, that's the thing you will be making use of. Not it's design. As for the OS go over to Cyanogenmod and flash your phone with CM10.1. You will not be disappointed.
I personally never used Android but I've heard really good things about it. Also, as an iPhone user I have to agree with you as for major improvements from iPhone 4/4s to iPhone 5 there hasn't been many, if any at all. I haven't even upgraded to the 4s or 5 because of that. However after messing around with the iOS 7 beta and now beta 2 I can say that there hasn't been much of an improvement besides the interface change, app icon changes(which are subject to be changed), Airdrop support(which doesn't work on iPhone 4 atm) and a few other additions. And in all honestly Apple is lagging behind the competition, these changes should have been made a long time ago.
And if I wasn't into iOS development I probably wouldn't even own an iPhone because I would have bought the S4 as a replacement.