Me and two of my friends had their S3's killed by the sudden death syndrome,
I mean we were extremely disappointed by this.
Earlier I was considering to continue on the Samsung Galaxy S series as I earlier had S2 then I bought S3 and I was waiting for an S4 to come out.
They lost their customer now,
Performance-wise it seems to me that we are reaching a saturation point in smartphones, like this year the pixel density on 1080p screens on smartphones came out with will be the last thing to make any difference to the smartphones, beyond this resolution on smartphones you won't notice any difference at all even if you squeeze your face on the screen (its a different story in case of tablets).
In terms of screen technology there will be competition like TFT vs SAMOLED or vs LCD (put more fancy names here).
As far as I see the smartphone industry has figured out the processors, kind of almost figured out the screen and RAM and storage,
so these things are slowly becoming irrelevant to the average consumer. (unless you are dual-booting Ubuntu and what not)
Now there will be competition among build quality, camera (still loads of work needed in this field), software, user-interface, and most of all battery life (some serious technical revolution needed here).
We can clearly see that most of the companies have already started competing in these fields taking their focus off the processors.
This time I am choosing Sony Xperia Z only due to it's build quality and waterproof features (not so dust proof I am sure
).
I know it's viewing angles are bad and battery also sucks, but at-last I find it better looking and artistic than my old dead S3.
