so it won't work for Verizon or Sprint, unless all you want to use is data. Probably not.

Basically it's a steal of a phone for the price. It's a better deal than the Nexus 3 and 4 were. It has high end specs at a bargain price. It's equivalent to an S5 or HTC One or a g3. It's the best deal you can find on a high spec phone right now. That's what all the noise is about. It's a lot like how the Moto G is wiping out the low-end budget market. The formula is to put out a high quality phone for about half the price of the competitors. They literally can't make them fast enough to keep up with demand.

A big selling point is the custom operating system by CyanogenMod. It's a version of CM11 that looks like stock android, but once you go into settings, it much, much more customizable than stock android. Basically if there's a feature or component of the phone that you want to modify, you're able to change it to exactly how you want. You can do the same thing by rooting and installing a CM11 Rom on a regular android phone, but for less-accomplished tech people, it's built into the phone.