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.