BTW, I was an early Android adopter, buying my original Moto Droid 1 (A855) in November 2009. It was great - within 2 months I had rooted it and pushed the native 550 MHz processor to 1200 MHz, and I was running on the latest Android version up until Froyo. At that time it was about a year old, I'd lost my early hobbyist enthusiasm, and turned my attention elsewhere. For nearly 3 years it was a highly reliable phone - great reception, extremely stable, etc.
About 6 months ago I started looking for a new phone, but VZW didn't look like it was going to bring LTE to my burg until late 2013. Two weeks ago I got an email from VZW saying LTE was here in Lubbock. I visited my Verizon store that day and bought the SCH-I535, the VZW version of the Samsung Galaxy S III, in pebble blue. The SCH-I535 comes with 2 GB internal memory (most S3 versions have 1 GB), and mine came with 32 GB internal storage.
Gawd, I'm so happy with this phone.
The screen is just stunning. Big. Reading e-books on this phone is as easy as on my 6" Kindle (except, of course, outdoors). Web pages are highly readable.
The LTE service is great! Using LTE, I almost always get 15-16.5 Mb/s down and 2.5-3 Mb/s up (measured with the Speedtest app). At home on wireless, the phone gets about 16 down and 1.5 up (the limits of my cable internet). So this is just as fast as my home desktop - faster actually, since the browser is tiny and not full of add-ons. Web pages pop almost instantly. At home, I find myself reaching for my phone to look up things rather than my laptop as I used to.
Regarding battery life - I don't know where the criticism is coming from. I recently ordered and installed a screen protector, the Armorsuit MilitaryShield (also a case, the Acase Superleggera PRO), and was disappointed with how it dulled the image. So I turned the screen brightness all the way up - no more problem. Also, I always have wifi on, as I'm always at home, office, or a client's office (and I have the wifi pw's for all them). Rather than turning it on and off all the time, I just leave it on. GPS also, as I use a couple of apps that require them. With all that, and with fairly heavy phone use and fairly regular reading or browsing when not with clients, I still have 40 or 50 percent battery left at the end of a long day. Since I'm used to plugging in every night, it's no big deal. For the occasional day when I have a 4 hour conversation (yup, I have these), I plug the cable into my laptop and charge while talking.
The camera is also very, very good on this phone, and the voice quality is crystal clear at both ends.
This is an amazing phone, and I don't even use some of the whizbang features on their commercials (I don't know anyone I'd care to bump phones with to trade playlists, and most of the social features hold no interest to me). I'm seriously impressed at how fast this phone does everything. And the capacity is amazing. Of the 2 GB RAM, I've only used about 670 MB with about 75 apps. The 32 GB internal memory is augmented by the old 16 GB microSD chip from my earlier Droid - it's loaded with about 100 or so full albums of music (about 10.5 GB), around a 100 e-books, and plenty of pictures and documents. And I still have about 30 GB free (of the combined memory + SD).