I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and I've had it for a little over a year now. I still love the phone as much as the first day I bought it and wouldn't be able to live without it (just thought I'd put that in there). I did, however, have a problem, after the most recent update to 4.3, setting my lockscreen shortcuts and widgets, which I've always had set up on my phone. They were grayed out where I couldn't select them. Also grayed out was under settings-My Device-Voice control-Camera where I could take pictures with the voice commands "capture", "shoot", "smile", and "cheese". I searched all over the internet and couldn't find a solution. I found someone having an unrelated problem, however, and they told them to change their home screen mode (settings-my device-home screen mode) from easy mode to standard mode and decided to check this out (even though I knew it would reset my home screens I had worked so hard to set up). When I had originally bought the phone I didn't realize the difference and I think it set it up on easy mode automatically (can't really remember) So I swyped all my home screens (the feature that lets you swype across the screen to take a screen shot of your phone) so I remembered how they were set up (the only thing I couldn't take a screen shot of was my folders at the bottom of the screen) so I had to reset those up, but as soon as I changed the home screen mode to standard the options previously grayed out became available to select. I wanted to post this in case anyone else had the same problem and was unable to come up with a solution for it. Hope this helps someone.
I was wrong, you can actually put widgets on your lockscreen. I never noticed that
Let me explain that better. I was trying to get my original widget back where it showed the date time and messages. When I reset all this and went back to my lockscreen I was able to add 5 pages of widgets to my lock screen (each widget is on a separate page or screen on my lockscreen). So now when I press the power button and see my clock I can swype over to the left and access my weather widget, then I swype to another page and have my email widget, another page has my mini calender widget. This just came in the update where I can access this info without unlocking my phone. You can have a total of 5 widgets on your lockscreen, but you can select from a dozen or so depending on the apps installed on your phone.