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Agreed on every count. I love my Note II's size, flip cover, and battery life, and the Note 4 looks incredibly tempting. That said... a word of caution. I absol

Agreed on every count. I love my Note II's size, flip cover, and battery life, and the Note 4 looks incredibly tempting. That said... a word of caution. I absolutely loved my Note II when I first upgraded from my iPhone 4 two years ago, and now I'm starting to despise it. I rather suspect that Samsung is deliberately hobbling my Note II with Touchwiz iterations. The phone is drastically slower than it was when I bought it, despite reformats and careful management of open apps. The camera is no longer accessible from the lock screen and takes eons to open after unlocking. Once the camera app is loaded, I have to manually turn on HDR EVERY SINGLE TIME. And the pictures it takes are pretty terrible -- there seems to be terrible shutter lag, nearly all photos are now grainy and blurry, and many of the pictures I take are never saved to memory. It's inexplicable. I love the phone's display and battery life, and it's still PERFECT for reading books and articles. But the camera and Touchwiz have just gotten crappier and crappier. I'd love to upgrade to CyanogenMod, but unfortunately this is the international version of the Note II with a proprietary Exynos processor -- Samsung never released sufficient information for CyanogenMod to work properly. So I'm stuck with Touchwiz and a deliberately crippled phone. For this reason alone, I think I'm switching back to Apple this fall. The iPhone camera is still best-in-class, and the camera app is SO fast to open and use. I just feel stupid paying a price premium for Apple when all Samsung needed to do was not cripple my camera. Haha whoops. I started this post with the intention of praising the Note. My Note II WAS a perfect phablet for its era, but Samsung has deliberately or negligently crippled my once-beloved phone. Once the phablet iPhone is released and I find an iOS reader that compares to Android's Moon+ Reader, I have strong incentive to switch back to Apple.

fpgeek 12y ago
I'm actually running CyanogenMod on my N7105 (international Note 2 with Exynos processor and LTE) and it is a big upgrade from TouchWiz. From what I remember, CM11 M6 (my first attempt) had a some painful rough edges, but things got a lot better starting with M8. It's not bug-free (and, in particular, the camera is still more temperamental than I'd like), but neither is TouchWiz (where, for example, GPS is more temperamental). The last time I checked neither felt clearly buggier than the other in my daily use (and CM has the bonus of not requiring some apps to paper over TouchWiz API "quirks"). Ironically, I'm also unhappy with my Note 2, but for a very different reason: It turns out the Nexus 7 LTE is just barely portable enough for me to carry around almost all the time, so it has become my goto device for ebooks, video and browsing. So I'm perfectly happy with my Note 2's software, but it has lost its size advantage and I want smaller hardware (maybe the Xperia Z3 Compact?).
- bane 12y ago
  Out of curiosity does the S-Pen still work at all under CyanogenMod?
  - fpgeek 12y ago
    The hardware works fine (including pressure sensitivity and the pen button), you just lose the proprietary Samsung apps. But, as noted in other comments, those apps have their own issues, so they're no great loss. You're probably better off with third-party replacements even if you're not using CyanogenMod (e.g. Papyrus instead of S Note).
bane 12y ago
I had a similar problem with my Galaxy Nexus. It just got slower and slower almost to the point of unusability. I think it's a TRIM issue that I'm hoping is resolved with the Note 3. We'll see. I don't use my phone camera almost at all, just a personal thing. But the few times I've used the phone app on the Note 3 I definitely didn't really like it. The default Google one on the Nexus was definitely better. However, the image quality is awesome. I'll probably just get a better camera app and use that instead. The s-pen has such a potential to be a killer feature, being able to store it in the phone body itself is enough of a feature to make it useful. Paint apps are amazing and now I'm no longer finger painting like I'm in kindergarten. If Samsung could just get their software game together they'd be unstoppable. I'm very interested in what Apple is going to bring to the phablet market. If history is any guide, it'll definitely force vendors like Samsung to up their game. This is a very good thing IMHO. The phablet market has been Android only for too long and Apple does a much better job picking and setting trends.
- fpgeek 12y ago
  From what I remember, the TRIM bugs were finally completely squashed in Android 4.3 (they were particularly severe for the Nexus 7 2012 because it had relatively slow internal storage). Assuming Samsung didn't reintroduce them somehow, the Note 3 (which launched with 4.3, IIRC) and newer should never have had any TRIM problems. Any Note 2 TRIM issues should have been fixed with the 4.3 update (which has been completely rolled out for some time, I think).
- Chevalier 12y ago
  My only experience is with the Note II, but third-party camera apps are somehow much worse than the crappy native Samsung camera app. I had high hopes for the Google Camera app, but they're all fairly terrible... and very few can do competent HDR. Even the amazing Windows Phone cameras are apparently held back by crappy camera software/image processing. Only Apple seems to do photos right, for some reason. Agreed about the S-Pen. I almost never use it, but my artist girlfriend LOVES to doodle with it and it makes a ton of sense for walk-and-talk jobs. Samsung should be applauded for their innovation. When the first Galaxy Note premiered, every critic insisted that a tiny form factor and fingers-only were the only correct way to build a phone. To this day, articles on phablets are filled with hysterics about how large phones are terrible. I just hope that size innovation won't stop at 5.5-5.7 inches...

fpgeek 12y ago

I'm actually running CyanogenMod on my N7105 (international Note 2 with Exynos processor and LTE) and it is a big upgrade from TouchWiz. From what I remember, CM11 M6 (my first attempt) had a some painful rough edges, but things got a lot better starting with M8. It's not bug-free (and, in particular, the camera is still more temperamental than I'd like), but neither is TouchWiz (where, for example, GPS is more temperamental). The last time I checked neither felt clearly buggier than the other in my daily use (and CM has the bonus of not requiring some apps to paper over TouchWiz API "quirks"). Ironically, I'm also unhappy with my Note 2, but for a very different reason: It turns out the Nexus 7 LTE is just barely portable enough for me to carry around almost all the time, so it has become my goto device for ebooks, video and browsing. So I'm perfectly happy with my Note 2's software, but it has lost its size advantage and I want smaller hardware (maybe the Xperia Z3 Compact?).

bane 12y ago
Out of curiosity does the S-Pen still work at all under CyanogenMod?
- fpgeek 12y ago
  The hardware works fine (including pressure sensitivity and the pen button), you just lose the proprietary Samsung apps. But, as noted in other comments, those apps have their own issues, so they're no great loss. You're probably better off with third-party replacements even if you're not using CyanogenMod (e.g. Papyrus instead of S Note).

bane 12y ago

I had a similar problem with my Galaxy Nexus. It just got slower and slower almost to the point of unusability. I think it's a TRIM issue that I'm hoping is resolved with the Note 3. We'll see. I don't use my phone camera almost at all, just a personal thing. But the few times I've used the phone app on the Note 3 I definitely didn't really like it. The default Google one on the Nexus was definitely better. However, the image quality is awesome. I'll probably just get a better camera app and use that instead. The s-pen has such a potential to be a killer feature, being able to store it in the phone body itself is enough of a feature to make it useful. Paint apps are amazing and now I'm no longer finger painting like I'm in kindergarten. If Samsung could just get their software game together they'd be unstoppable. I'm very interested in what Apple is going to bring to the phablet market. If history is any guide, it'll definitely force vendors like Samsung to up their game. This is a very good thing IMHO. The phablet market has been Android only for too long and Apple does a much better job picking and setting trends.

fpgeek 12y ago
From what I remember, the TRIM bugs were finally completely squashed in Android 4.3 (they were particularly severe for the Nexus 7 2012 because it had relatively slow internal storage). Assuming Samsung didn't reintroduce them somehow, the Note 3 (which launched with 4.3, IIRC) and newer should never have had any TRIM problems. Any Note 2 TRIM issues should have been fixed with the 4.3 update (which has been completely rolled out for some time, I think).
Chevalier 12y ago
My only experience is with the Note II, but third-party camera apps are somehow much worse than the crappy native Samsung camera app. I had high hopes for the Google Camera app, but they're all fairly terrible... and very few can do competent HDR. Even the amazing Windows Phone cameras are apparently held back by crappy camera software/image processing. Only Apple seems to do photos right, for some reason. Agreed about the S-Pen. I almost never use it, but my artist girlfriend LOVES to doodle with it and it makes a ton of sense for walk-and-talk jobs. Samsung should be applauded for their innovation. When the first Galaxy Note premiered, every critic insisted that a tiny form factor and fingers-only were the only correct way to build a phone. To this day, articles on phablets are filled with hysterics about how large phones are terrible. I just hope that size innovation won't stop at 5.5-5.7 inches...