I purchased an HTC 8X after watching reviews of the phone on TWIT and Engadget etc. I was impressed with the form factor of the phone and in particular the Beats audio. I was having all sorts of issues with the phone, random re-booting, blue tooth connectivity issues, dropped calls etc. I called my carrier (Bell Canada), HTC tech support and Microsoft with all three of them blaming each other for what I knew to be crappy performance. My dealer swapped out the phone but the symptoms remained! Having been a LONG time Windows Phone user (dating back to the Palm Treo days with Windows Mobile through to Windows Phone 7.5 on an LG C900B) I knew that eventually they would get the crap sorted out and I would have a decently working phone!
Then I heard that the Samsung ATIV S had arrived (finally, this was originally the phone that I was leaning towards when the models came out. based on the additional ram and removable battery and the reputation of the manufacturer). I had another phone eligible for a hardware update so I went with the ATIV S.
There is NO comparison. This is how Windows 8 should work! NO reboots, no Bluetooth issues, The only hiccup I have had thus far is with the additional RAM and metadata for music. If you don't store at least one song/album on the phones memory the OS does not "poll" the additional RAM for metadata info (probably as a memory feature of the OS) after sync you will see your albums and artist details but 10 minutes later all the songs will be there, however the "Artist" and "Album" art and info will magically disappear! Put one album on the phone memory and viola the OS starts polling the external RAM and works perfectly! This is a bug that I am sure will be addressed in an update but thank-you Microsoft for suggesting this work around. Call quality and reception is better with the Samsung, my clients complained of poor sound quality with the HTC, no complaints thus far with the ATIV S. I do like the wide angle camera on the HTC and the F2.0 aperture but the camera has no image stabilization which the Samsung has. All in all I am very happy with the Samsung, wish it had a burst and panorama mode for the camera (hopefully these will be provided as an update), and the headphones that came with it are workable but a little tinny, plastic sounding (although the HTC doesn't even come with HP's).
I highly recommend it.