New Note 4 Owner, a few questions

[zhris]

Disclaimer: I'm coming form an LG G3, so I'm using that as my frame of reference.

Just picked a Note 4, and after playing with it over the weekend I've decided that I do like the phone. The form factor is great (I wanted a big screen for my old man eyes),and the S-Pen looks like it could be very useful. however, there are a few things I'm not so fond of. If anyone has any tips or advice, I'd appreciate it!

• The battery drains crazy fast. After about an hour of simply poking around menus and browsing web pages, I lose about 20%. I'm hoping I just need to 'break in' the battery or something.
• WiFi is sloooooow. According to the speed test app on my phone, I get about 12MB down on cellular, and 23 on WiFi; however, while web pages load pretty much instantly on cell, it can take up to a minute for a page to load on WiFi... it almost feels like I have a dial-up cell phone.

Also, can someone explain exactly what KNOX is in plain English? It almost sounds like a secure cloud storage, but I'm not sure.

 

[adock22096]

The battery on mine was poor for the first few days but it got a lot better after that.

You could try forgetting the slow WiFi network and then setting it back up as a new network. This helped with mine when the wifi was slow.

Personally I don't know much about the Knox. From what I understood it was basically a security thing on the phone that gets tripped if you try to root the phone.

 

[Xingularity]

I started using my phone right out of the box. It had 65%. It drained pretty fast too. I set it to charge that night and I can now finish the day at 20 to 30%.

Posted via the Materialistic Android Central App

 

[bable]

The others are right about battery improving with time, when you first start it up a lot of stuff happens in the background. Also crappy wifi will drain it really quick, something to think of while tinkering with your other dilemma. I'm a heavy user for work and stock got me through 90% of my day, but Poprocks rom adds enough efficiency that now I end the day with 10-15%. For the wifi maybe try another browser? I find stock is slow but chrome reflects the speeds speedtest shows me.

Knox is a well encrypted corner of your phone protected by a hardware lock. Unless your work uses it or you're very embarrassed about your taste in adult videos, it's useless. When I got mine a year ago installing a custom recovery would break the hardware lock, but in my opinion it's well worth the freedom with roms you'll gain unless work requires crazy security. I tripped Knox on my note 3 too and it never effected warranty or resale value, but ymmv.

 

[Nitro211K]

Just to give more depth on KNOX as I am a user of it. First KNOX could refer to 2 things, to put it in simple terms it could show if your phone has been rooted because it would "trip" the Knox counter, so that if you "unrooted" the phone later on, the manufacturer could tell that the phone was rooted at some point thus voiding any warranty.

The other reference to KNOX is that it creates 2 phones in one. A personal phone and a Work phone if you will. What I use it for is as follow: I like to get my corporate/work e-mails and my work calendar on my phone even after/before work hours, and to do so on the phone normally I would have to allow the company IT dept. to take over my phone by encrypting the phone and having the ability to wipe it (as a security measure) also I will be forced to use a PIN security, instead of FingerPrint or Pattern to unlock my phone every time, which can be annoying. So to combat that KNOX creates a separate virtual phone within the Note 4 (called a container) which I can then allow my IT dept. to control that phone and not my personal phone. The KNOX container has a separate Lock screen and set of Apps. So I could have 2 G-mail apps or 2 Messaging Apps or 2 Gallery Apps (one for each container) that are totally independent from each other as if I was carrying 2 phones. The only down side to this (for me) is that if you use a smart watch as I do, you can only get Notifications on the watch from one of the containers and not both.

Hope this helps with understanding KNOX.

 

[d4691]

Correct. Drain and charge the battery as normal a few times, and it should get broken in after a few days. I also updated to 5.1.1 over the weekend and have been satisfied with my battery. I was on 5.0 for a long time, and was underwhelmed with battery performance. 5.1.1 using ODIN was a wipe and load, i got tired of waiting for the OTA update. So make sure you backup what you need if you do update.

 

[zhris]

Thanks, everyone! Now I know what KNOX is... not that I'll use it, but it's neat. The battery life has gotten better, but the WiFi is still killing me. I've tried every step I can find online; forgetting the network, changing channels, rebooting the router, resetting the phone... nothing helps (and I know it's the phone and not the router, because all my other wireless devices are fine, and this phone drags on *any* wifi). I'm getting to the point where I may ask for a replacement unit.

 

[pduffer]

I believe asking for a replacement would be the best choice based on your WiFi issues and steps you've taken to resolve them without success.