IPhone or Samsung? iPhone vs Samsung smartphones
Buying advice about whether to buy and iPhone or a Samsung phone. It’s iPhone vs Samsung.
Buying advice about whether to buy and iPhone or a Samsung phone. It’s iPhone vs Samsung.
iPhone or Samsung? We help those looking for a phone to choose between an iPhone and a Samsung phone. It’s iPhone vs Samsung in the smartphone world, and we have the answers.
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iPhone or Samsung is a question we are often asked. Oddly. There are, after all, myriad high-class smartphone makers on the market. Our current PC Advisor Best Buy is from LG, and I would personally recommend readers look at the HTC One ( M8) , the OnePlus One and any of the Sony or Nexus-branded devices that fill out the upper echelons of our Top 40 smartphones of 2014. Check out the full list here: The 40 best smartphones UK: The best mobile phones you can buy in 2014.
But it is the iPhone that retains the mindshare it gained when exploding the smartphone market in 2007, and Samsung is the only brand that comes close. Indeed, there are many people for whom ’iPhone’ still means high-class smartphone, and ’Samsung’ is the only alternative. And, after all, fully a quarter of our Top 40 smartphones are either iPhones or Samsung phones, so perhaps there is something in this. Let’s get into comparing the smartphone offerings of Samsung and Apple. ( See our iPhone 6 review.)
iPhone or Samsung: variety, availability, price range
My first thought was that Samsung wins this. Of course it does. No-one makes more varieties of smartphone than does Samsung, and its current UK products range in price from the £145 inc VAT Galaxy Fame up to the flagship-priced high-end Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Note 4. Screen sizes range from the 3.5in Fame up to the frankly massive 5.5in Galaxy Note 4. And there are even more specialised devices such as the Galaxy K Zoom that is a phone-camera rather than a camera phone.
Yes, all of these devices are Android-toting touchscreen smartphones, but that is to forget the ATIV S Windows Phone, and to lay aside the knowledge that the Galaxy Note devices have a stylus for more complex input. Oh, and while almost all Samsung handsets are plastic there is some variety in the metallic Galaxy Alpha. And that is before we get into varieties of colour and spec. If it is variety you want, Samsung beats iPhone. ( See also: iPhone 6 Plus vs Samsung Galaxy Note 4 comparison: battle of the flagship phablets.)
But variety is another way of looking at inconsistency, and if Apple locks down and limits its product range, it does so because it wishes to sell only at the high-end of the market. This tends to mean that you get a good experience when you buy an iPhone. And you may be surprised at the current range - it can’t match Samsung’s spectrum of the cheap and expensive, the big and the small, but Apple has a few handsets to sell these days.
Available to buy new today from Apple is the iPhone 6 Plus, the iPhone 6, iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c. Surprised? These are all touchscreen iOS smartphones, but they range in price from the £319 inc VAT iPhone 5c up to the £789 top-of-the-range iPhone 6 Plus. Screen sizes range from 3.5in to 5.5in ( sound familiar) , and like Samsung there is a variety of onboard storage options from 8GB up to 128GB. Samsung wins out here by also offering storage expansion slots on most of its handsets, but it is fair to say that the iPhone range is broader than it has ever been.
Apple iPhones are pretty widely available on the high street these days, and you can of course buy directly from Apple. You don’t have the latter option with Samsung, but it is also fair to say that Samsung phones are available from more UK vendors than are iPhones. Perhaps this reflects the wider price variant, and the cheaper range to which Samsung drops. Apple wants to keep hold of its margin at the high end