It really doesn’t matter what your friends and family use. You should use what makes you happy and I’d say Samsung will probably make you happy.

I will always encourage the swap to Samsung.

I’m in roughly the same boat as you right now s9+ is showing signs of needing to be upgraded but I’m gonna wait until the S24 is officially announced so I can decide if I want to upgrade to that or the S23 Ultra.

I’d go for the 23. I feel like the flip is just a gimmick and from an engineering perspective just another point of error aka an extra thing to potentially break on the phone.

In terms of cases I cannot recommend Otter Box cases enough. I’ve been using them since I was an iPhone Andy and they even kept those flimsy phones in one piece. The case I have on my phone has taken an incredible fucking beating for the past few years to the point where I’ve broken of chunks of it and my phone is still unscathed when I drop it.

I mean yeah. It’s pretty well documented by people that actually know something about phones that Galaxies tend to outperform.