As we enter the dog days of summer, it seems like the only mobile story with legs is the ongoing legal hostility between Apple and Samsung. Now, I’m not here to argue for or against either company’s case, nor am I here to debate the relative merits of a company building a business on getting someone else to do their homework. But I will say it’s fitting that while using the Samsung Galaxy SIII (GS3 from here on), my thoughts repeatedly turned to the iPhone 4S. Both are the flagship devices of the two dominant mobile platforms, and when you want to understand how your ship stacks up, you put it into the water against the next best thing (my apologies to HTC One X fans, but Samsung is the biggest, baddest Android manufacturer on the block, and the GS3 is its signature phone).

The GS3 is a very pretty phone. With rounded corners and curved lines, the GS3 looks good on its own, and feels good in your hand (although my stubby fingers made it difficult to to reach across the entirety of the screen without moving the device in my hand). I especially enjoy how the chrome band that encircles the device flows into the back casing, although I wish the build materials were a little more durable; in two weeks of relatively benign use I chipped the sucker twice. At 136.6 x 70.6 mm, the GS3 is more than a little snug resting in your front pocket, but upon pulling it out in front of friends, I was often greeted with an “ooh, what’s that phone?”

The oohs continue when the GS3 screen lights up. With a 4.8″ Pentile Super AMOLED display, the GS3′s mobile window is big, bright, and beautiful, with rich colors and sharp contrasts. Yes, Android fanboy, there are better screens out there, but that doesn’t mean the GS3′s isn’t also great. Android newbs, don’t let the Pentile AMOLED label scare you, either. I saw no examples of blue color shift, over-saturation, or jagged text found in other Pentile AMOLED displays. I would still recommend seeing the display in person, as screenshots can be misleading, and levels of annoyance seem to vary from eye to eye, but using the GS3 will make it hard to go back to the iPhone 4S’ smaller screen, despite the superior pixel density of the Retina display.

Out With the Old, In With the New

In fact, I will go so far as to say that when placed next to the 4S, the GS3 makes the iPhone look old - like it belongs to a different era of mobile design. This sense of decrepitude is aided by the GS3′s LTE radio, which produces some ermahgerd download, streaming and browsing speeds. Couple this with the typically zippy dual-core Snapdragon chipset (the international version is rocking an even faster quad-core Exynos chipset, but takes a hit on battery life. See The Verge’s GS3 review for a comparison chart) and an 8 MPx camera that, under the best circumstances (i.e. natural light, with a low dynamic range), can match the results of the 4S, and the GS3 just might be the flagship smartphone you want to keep in your harbour.

There’s just one nagging caveat: the 4S is Apple’s flagship device for about another month. I know, I know, how can I possibly compare the GS3 to a device that hasn’t been announced yet, let alone released for mass consumption? Well, because I feel it’s more unfair to compare the GS3, released in North America June of 2012, to a device released in October of 2011. Unless Samsung’s business model rests in selling Galaxy S smartphones in the down time between iPhone releases (ahem), this Fall’s model is the GS3′s true competition.

So what do we know about the next iPhone? Without grinding the rumour mill too fine, we can be generally confidant in a few things: it will be bigger (in a form factor that will easily fit in one hand), faster, with LTE, iOS 6, and a better camera. From a hardware standpoint, it will essentially be feature competitive or superior to the GS3.

So where does that leave prospective smartphone buyers trying to decide between what’s available now and what will (likely) be available soon? Well, sometimes the make of the ship isn’t as important as the country of the flag its flying; or, ditching my overused analogy for a moment, if all flagship smartphones are essentially rocking the same hardware, then the underlying OS becomes the differentiating component.

Troll Bait

To debate the merits of iOS vs. Android is to open a can of worms filled with trolls, napalm, dogma, dead kittens, and a bunch of words you should never say in front of your mother (not even your mother, fanboy), and is far far far beyond the scope of this post. But a few general statements can be made for both platforms that will prove to be instructive.

It’s no secret that that iOS is starting to look a little long in the tooth, and is in need of structural revisions (dynamic home screen utility vs. static icons, a notifications system that is actually worth a damn) that will not be coming in iOS 6. But iOS 6 will be the continued refinement of the fastest, most stable, and most easy to use mobile platform on the market. Oh, and the one with the most and best working apps (don’t argue. Seriously, just don’t).

Android, almost by design, is much more of a mixed bag. Android 4.0 is powerful and highly customizable, and I am a noted fan of what is in Jelly Bean. But Android’s customization is in fact necessary, because you’ll have to dedicate a lot of time to getting it to work the way you want, or at all. This might mean downloading replacements for the brutal default email (if you’re not a Gmail user) or keyboard applications (seriously, the predictive text is so fucking bad on the GS3 it makes me long for the 4S’s keyboard in the same way that I long for a BlackBerry keypad when using the 4S), or it might mean replacing Samsung’s TouchWiz skin with a stock ROM to get Jelly Bean ahead of the manufacturer’s notoriously recalcitrant update schedule. In many ways, and despite Samsung’s best attempts to make it otherwise, an Android phone is akin to the Millennium Falcon: a powerful machine that must be handled just right, its technological peccadilloes standing in sharp contrast to the uniformity of Imperial (Apple) design.

Conclusions? Don’t look at me. This post started with a question: what do you want from your flagship smartphone? I can’t answer that question for you. I can tell you that the Samsung Galaxy S3 leaves me unwilling to return to the 4S, but I will likely drop it like a hot stone once the new iPhone model is available. Hardware being equal (and come on, the new iPhone is probably going to be just a bit better hardware-wise), I favour superior apps, and uniformity in design and function, over customizability and the unavoidable notion that I’m using something hacked together. But like I said, I’m not here to argue either company’s case.

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