I have a Note 2014 edition and like you, I feel it is clunky by comparison. I really wanted to love it but lame battery life in comparison to a three-year old

I have a Note 2014 edition and like you, I feel it is clunky by comparison. I really wanted to love it but lame battery life in comparison to a three-year old iPad3 and the inability of S Note to ignore my hand motions and not do zooming when I move my hand irritates me. Coupled with worse performance than the iPad3, and I have the LTE edition of the Note. I can only imagine how stuttery and slow the non-LTE edition is (which uses an 8 core chip and got rubbish performance reviews). Using Google Maps in 3D mode gives me framerates like viewing a compressed VNC session over an SSH link on a Raspberry Pi over a 2G GSM connection. Slow.