They are both plastic, and both will get covered with cases to protect them. But the GS3 is shiny and pretty out of the box, which sells. I prefer the One X in this respect, but then I also preferred the N900 and N9. We can see how well that turned out. Yes, but the HTC one was particularly bloated, at least until Sense 3.6. Never tried Sense 4, but I hear it got a bit better so at least they fixed that. I'll get to the CM10 and other custom ROMs later. Ok, now about the custom ROMs. I had the misfortune of buying the original HTC Sensation back when HTC did not allow unlocking bootloaders. It took a very long time for devs to root it and guess what happened... Right, by the time it was rooted everybody either moved on or never bought the damn thing in the first place. The result is that for my HTC Sensation CM9 was delayed for months, and the camera still does not record in 1080p. I am using a hacked CM9 that has the 1080p recording enabled and a few extra features. But it's maintained by ONE guy, since the OTHER guy broke his Sensation. If he drops his Sensation on concrete by accident, my phone will never get another update. And I think CM9/10 proper only has one or two developers as well. Comparing that to the HTC Desire, I'd say it's pretty sad... And by the way, CM10 for the Sensation is still in beta with even more stuff broken. Sure, there are a lot of custom Sense and de-Sensified ROMs, but none that were clean and stable like CM9. The quick flagship obsolence has a couple of other implications. You buy it and too soon you're behind the curve in the cool factor. It makes no difference to me because I never buy phones for more than $300, but when you drop $5-700 on a phone you want it to be the latest and greatest at least for a while. So after all that, do you think I will buy another HTC any time soon? No, I'll get the phone with the most developers regardless of who manufactures it. If the One series were a success, then HTC wouldn't have dropped as low as they had. The hardware may be nice, but for whatever reason *cough* GS3*cough* people are not buying them. Because HTC's market share is in the single digits. I'd say the OP was fairly close in his assessment.