In the good old days, you could get a 12 month mobile phone contract, so you could update your phone every year (great for a geek like me). My friends and colleagues always knew me as the guy with the latest phone.

In recent years, they phased out the 12 month contracts, replacing them with 18 and 24 month contracts. Now they only have 24 month contracts – that means that you get stuck with a mobile for a whopping 2 years, so you have to choose wisely!

Both my fiancée Rebecca and I have phone contracts that are ending soon (June and May respectively), so we decided to cut our contracts short a little bit and get new phones.

Rebecca was fixated on the Samsung Galaxy S5 and I had my eyes on the HTC One (M8). This review gives a good overview of the differences between the 2 phones – in the end they are both very similar, so in some ways it comes down to personal preferences.

I decided to go with the Galaxy S5 because:

• The buttons are physical, not on the screen (which takes up a fair bit of screen space) and makes them always accessible
• Water resistant (for 1 meter, 30 minutes) – drop it in the bath and it will be okay (I actually had my HTC One X in the washing machine for 10 minutes and that was okay!)
• Better camera (quality and focus time, plus 4K video), although the post-focusing feature of the HTC One (M8) is very cool
• Heart rate sensor
• Fingerprint reader (I wish it supported more than 3 fingers though)
• Gifts – not to be overlooked, Samsung give some trials to decent services

The contact I got was:

• 24 months on Vodafone, £19.99 for the phone, £47/month (I get a 20% discount through work)
• 5GB data, 4G, unlimited text, unlimited calls, Spotify for 2 years (I was already a subscriber, so this will genuinely save me money), unlimited data for 3 months

I got it in black and Rebecca got hers in gold (which looks very nice).

We are both very impressed with them so far!