After having a few others phones I saw someone with Note 2 or 3 & knew that was what I wanted. It was just before the 4's came out and I had one of the 1st ones my local Verizon store got in. It a was the first phone I really took to and customized, etc. I'm still not happy about the permanent battery and never saw anything extremely compelling on the 5,7,8,9 to make me give up that although I probably would've bought a few newer ones if it weren't for the replaceable battery issue but as soon as I started reading about the 10 in January/Feb. had decided I was finally going to do it and had been pretty psyched all year. Of course my 4 died in July and I bought a mint one on CL to hold me over but never got it set up like my orig.