My First Impressions...

[kris.richards]

I've only had it activated for a few hours, but battery life, signal quality, and speed are amazing so far. Only about 9GB usable out of the box. The VZW bloatware is kind of a bummer, but most of it can be disabled. No easy wireless charging mod sucks as well, but hey what ya gonna do? Home button logo doesn't appear to easily be removable. It feel to me as if it's sort of engraved into the button rather than a decal. It's not that noticeable after a while though. Loving the S-pen! It doesn't slide in and out very easily, but I guess that's what keeps it in there. The OEM Flip case (Marble White) is awesome so far as well. It comes attached to a replacement battery cover that ironically enough just has the "Samsung" logo near the top. No VZW branding whatsoever making the home button the only thing distinguishing it from the INTL version. What do you all think? Awesome phone assuming it's not a year before we see 4.2? I think so. Loving it.

 

[KSChris]

Yeah, I'm loving everything about it. Not one complaint at all. I'm blown away!

I did notice that max RAM is only 1.75 when I look at the Task Manager. It's supposed to be a 2GB RAM device, no?

 

[infmethod]

I love this phone and it is absolutely perfect for my needs. I csn definitely see it being way too big for some people though.

 

[anon(394005)]

The OEM Flip case (Marble White) is awesome so far as well. It comes attached to a replacement battery cover that ironically enough just has the "Samsung" logo near the top. No VZW branding whatsoever making the home button the only thing distinguishing it from the INTL version. What do you all think? Awesome phone assuming it's not a year before we see 4.2? I think so. Loving it.

So that explains why Verizon wanted the logo on the home button! Seriously, I've been setting up/playing with my Note2 for the past four hours and it hasn't had the slightest hiccup at anything I've thrown at it. It's buttery smooth and FAST! LTE data connection is rock solid and fast. Voice calls (ear and speaker) are loud and clear. Almost 2.5 hours of screen on time and only down to 80% battery left. Awesome! I did go through and disable all the bloatware (there was more than I thought there'd be ). So far, what I'm enjoying the most is the 5.5" screen. It's beautiful, bright and crisp; everything looks great on it! Also, love the stock browser it comes with, seems to be very similar to the AOSP browser. It's fast and smooth, has text overflow (double click, it zooms in to fit text on the screen) and supports the same bookmarks I had on my Thunderbolt, so was able to bring them over without a problem. Really like the built-in file manager (My Files) too (no need to download one now). It allows you to browse and manipulate any files/folders on the internal storage and the SD card. Sweet! Need more time with the S-Pen (never used one before), but it has some very cool functions, look forward to learn all its tricks. The only thing I'm looking at yet is root (to be able to use a blocking hosts file and make nandroid backups), but I'm going to wait on that for the time being, let things settle before getting that involved yet.