[oelmekki]

I've got an s3 and a nexus 7, so I can compare both in the long term. Touchwiz is not a bad product, though it adds actually very few to stock experience.

The main problem is that for such minor enhancements, you are condemn to be always late in android updates.

We are now fairly aware that updates are not only about getting new features and bugfixes, but also are the main mean to avoid security breaches.

If OEMs don't get that, what to expect if they build their own OS ? Not saying it will be bad, but they'll have hard time to alleviate my worries about that.

[FaddiCat]

> Touchwiz is not a bad product, though it adds actually very few to stock experience.

Not anymore, anyway. But TouchWiz added quite a bit before ICS came out. Off the top of my head: a customisable dock bar, resizable widgets, a paginated app menu, the app switcher you get when holding 'home', power saving toggles in the notifications drop down...

Admittedly these days it's just a way for Samsung to put a unified, iPhone-like interface across all of its phones, but in the beginning it added a number of features missing from Android.

[codeka]

Yeah, a lot of what was in TouchWiz is now in stock Android.

This is probably kind of subjective, but my problem with TouchWiz is it's butt-ugly. I mean, if you think stock Android was a mess (and it's not so bad now with Holo) then TouchWiz is to stock Android as a 2 year old's art project is to the Mona Lisa.

It's a horrible mess of Holo, Gingerbread and just weird random stuff that doesn't fit with either.

[FaddiCat]

Yeah, I agree. That's the reason why I stay away from Samsung phones. In practical terms they're great, but they're shockingly un-aesthetic. In hardware and software.

[vshade]

I used to think this, but I found the latest version of TouchWiz to be quite enjoyable.