For my first smartphone, I chose to take a risk and go with a Samsung Galaxy S4 instead of the other leading competitor. I LOVE it. Almost as soon as I got it I purchased a 64 GB SD card to go in the phone so I could keep all of my photos and music on my phone without ever having to worry about storage issues. The camera is great and has many nice features. The phone lasts me all day long and with 4G , speeds on the internet are very fast. Also with the newest software updates this phone is great. When I first purchased the device it would occasionally get very hot and hard to hold, with a case this problem is fixed but other than that no major issues. You should definitely get a Samsung Galaxy S4 or maybe a newer version!
My particular phone is amazingly durable. I stopped using a case and screen protector a long time ago as they proved significantly less durable than the phone itself. Also, the Galaxy S4 has a pretty good camera, oh-so-gorgeous 1080p screen, and excellent quality all around in terms of quality and quantity of features. However, my qualms are with my specific model, the i545 as it officially got the 5.0.1 Lollipop update, but actually is not able to upgrade past 4.4.2. 4.4.2 was not well developed, as it causes SD cards to be pretty useless. If you try to use the SD card for music, using, for example, the Google Play Music app, that's all fine and well, but if you fill the internal storage up too full, the phone automatically moves some app data to the SD card, which is a problem because the app cannot actually read the SD card. The app stops working, you lose your data, and the SD card starts telling you it needs to be formatted. Therefore, this phone's only good if you have a lot of internal storage. Overall, though, it's pretty good.
Overall I think Samsung makes great phones and the Samsung Galaxy S4 is the third Samsung Phone I have had in a 4 year period and I think they make high quality products. I only have two complaints with the S4, the first is the fact that the Volume Buttons & The Power Buttton are placed where if you grip the phone and try to turn the volume down you end up holding both of them down at the same time causing the screen to turn off. The second complaint is the major lack of storage, I had not even had my phone for a year and all of the storage I started with was practically gone and there isnt any way that I see of restoring it..