Well, it's not perfect, but what is? I really like the phone though, and the battery life in particular is impressive, at least for how I typically use my phone. I went 24 hours on the battery the other day and still had close to 40% left. Right now, I'm looking at 11 hours on the battery and I still have about 75% power remaining. Granted, the screen is on for only a small part of that (a bit over 1 hour right now, out of the ~11 it's been unplugged), but my old phones wouldn't get anywhere near this kind of battery life. My original Epic was draining ~10% per hour in bad cases, ~5% per hour in good cases. I got home today with more battery power than I'd have left at lunch time on my Epic. I don't know exactly what Samsung did to improve battery life so much, but this is a huge advantage of the phone for me -- not having to worry about mid-day recharges anymore is a relief.
I have experienced some of the issues others mentioned, here and/or elsewhere. My WiFi at home sometimes drops and immediately reconnects for no obvious reason, and no other device in my house (computers, wife's phone, Roku, etc.) does this. While this is a bit annoying, it's mostly a nuisance and not some kind of deal-breaker. I had a little bit of the voice call audio garbling, but the recent update's supposed to fix that. Sometimes there's a little lag turning on the screen, but it doesn't really bother me.
What remains to be seen though is how promptly Samsung will or won't get Android OS updates to us. They were terrible with my old original Epic -- it took ~9-10 months to get an update and the phone was sometimes 2 versions behind current. The Note 3 has the current version of Android now, but Kit Kat is coming in the near future. How long will it be before that update hits our devices? I'm trying not to worry too much about it this time around, but that's still a big question for me. I'd really like to see Samsung and Sprint get us Android OS updates in a timely manner.
But still, this phone is pretty amazing. Very powerful, long battery life, all the handwriting features with the S Pen -- great stuff.
Edit: Just thought of something else. I know pre-installed bloatware is generally not appreciated, but since we all know it's going to come anyway, wouldn't it be nice if the carriers gave us the full/pro/paid versions instead of the ad-supported free versions? I guess they'll never do that, because it means cutting into their profits. But if they did, it could make the apps somewhat more appealing, at least to some users.
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