So I finally took the plunge and bid a fond farewell to my iPhone 4 after receiving delivery of my Docomo Galaxy S4 in beautiful Arctic Blue. I must say that I am amazed by the phone and it's just so vastly superior to the iPhone in so many ways. I was originally concerned about the larger size, but it's just a little larger than the IP5 and much thinner.

However, I'm experiencing some teething pains on setup and hope the community can help me.

1) Email - I manually setup all of my accounts, and everything is either Exchange or IMAP except for two Yahoo accounts. The problem is syncing the status flag on messages - the phone is not setting the message flag to 'read', so the message is showing up as new when I connect via my laptop, and sometimes the message shows up as new on the phone even though I set the status to 'read' on the laptop. This is happening for every account, so it can't be the email provider - it must be something on the phone. Messages set to 'read' on both the laptop/webmail and the phone will pop back up as 'new' the next time I open the phone's mail app and sync again to get new messages.

I am receiving Gmail messages automatically, even though I set the sync interval to "manual" for this, and all accounts. I don't want the battery impacted by the phone doing pull/push in the background, especially given that I specifically set it for manual.

Is the answer here a different mail app?

2) Photos - Using Kies, I was able to move all my SMS and photos over from the IP4, however the transfer dumped all of the photos into one album called 'Camera' and I lost the albums and which photo went into which album. With over 600 photos in this one folder, it could be an endless task to sort and refile, especially doing it on the phone. What is the best way to handle this? Create the folders on the phone, then browse the device on a Windows machine and cut/paste blocks of photos from the main DCIM folder to the album sub-folders? Or is there another way?

3) Calendar Sync - my calendar updated accurately from Exchange (I'm using SPlanner) and brought over all of my meetings, but my appointments were not carried over. I use appointments in MS Outlook to block time, indicates OOO periods, vacation, etc - but these are not showing up in SPlanner. Any ideas?

4) SMS/Text - Kies was able to export and import my substantial collection of SMS from the IP4, however the Galaxy seems to choke almost every time I open the messaging app and often freezes or crashes, requiring a reboot. Is the solution here to use another SMS app? If so, any suggestions?

Most of the rest of the phone settings appear fairly easy to figure out and I checked a couple online guides for optimizing the device. Battery strength is probably similar to the IP4, meaning not so great - but I will tweak some settings and hopefully get it to last longer. I have almost all of the Power Saving mode features on.

So far I will say that I am very happy with my new device.