needs good girth

Nexus 4. Nothing beats vanilla android and it can be unlocked with one command. Also you are guaranteed updates by Google because it is a Nexus device. My Galaxy Nexus is still going strong.

Seeing as my screen size is the same I would say its perfect. Not a monster screen like the Note but a better size than an iPhone. The best thing to do would go play with one at a store in person to get a feel for it.

I would recommend the Nexus 4. It is a great phone. BTW the screen is 4.7". It is probably one of the best for roms and such as well.

Why not get a Nokia N900? It runs pure and truly free GNU/Linux, from what I've heard.

The Nexus 4 is a pretty good phone, but like most mid-sized phones these days, the battery is less than impressive, which leads me to suggest you wait and see what Motorola has in store for battery power in their Moto X phones, which should be in the same price range, but will have a bit less in the way of pure horsepower.

Another thing to consider is storage. If you, like me, want to use the phone to store music or any sort of media, anything without an SD card slot, such as the Nexus 4, isnt all that attractive, especially with the tiny internal storage maximum of 16GB. People will argue that you can stream music, but you and me both know that data plans in Canada couldn't be shittier if they were infused with Tim Hortons coffee.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 sort of covers all these points well, but unfortunately, is fucking expensive off and even sometimes on contract, and starts to get into the large region of phones.

Personally, phones just frustrate me, because it would seem that there is no company out there that makes a phone with reasonable battery life, SD card functionality, and an unlocked bootloader. As big as the android phone ecosystem is, there is becoming very little variety in hardware, which is really unfortunate.

Also, I would love if someone could call me out as being wrong, if I have overlooked a phone that fits this description, I would love to hear about it.

I just ordered a Nexus 4 from Google Play. $350 AUD which is pretty reasonable to me. I've always had a phone provided by my employer (iPhone) but I'm starting a new job soon and this one doesn't come with a phone!
My Nexus 4 should be delivered on Monday. I think I'm more excited about that than I am about my new job :D

Yeah that's true but I just spent the last 3 years with an iPhone so I'm used to it. I also only bought the cheaper 8GB version because I really don't need that much space. I don't carry music around with me (I usually stream music) and I don't take many photos.
Anyway, I got my phone on Tuesday and I absolutely love it. 100000x better than my old iPhone 4S.

I've never owned a QWERTY phone. I almost bought the BlackBerry Z10 (not QWERTY) but I haven't lived to regret it yet.

Yeah samsung hardware is often very low quality.

I have a Nexus 4 and I can really recommend buying it. It is a very good phone, easily customizable and worth every cent. The Galaxy S4 and the HTC One are good too.
If I was you, I would either get the Nexus 4 or HTC One.

Edit: Oh, I just saw that you bought already a phone, sorry :D
Well, Samsung phones usually don't have a good build quality. You should have gotten the HTC One, HTC phones have a high build quality and it's made of aluminium.

I recently switched from the iPhone 4 to the HTC One and I personally have been loving it. The phone really looks and feels great. The build quality overall is just very satisfying. As for it's preformance I have never had an issue with it, it runs flawlessly, the speakers on it are very nice, I don't really need to get into the software because that's rather trivial it unless you're comparing with the iPhone or something. Overall I'd give it a 9.0/10 it isn't perfect (The battery life could be a problem if you use a lot of demanding features frequently without charging the phone) but overall, it feels great, looks great, preforms great. At least in my opinion, I'd recommend it. Second choice would be the Galaxy S4 I suppose.