I'm finding a lot of little things have changed, while the overall style has remained pretty much the same. For example, the transparent notification bar while on the home screen (which now works in GO Launcher as well.) The wifi icon now has data up/down arrows so we can see when data is being transferred. The 4G LTE icon is always present now, but greyed out when on wifi.
Almost immediately I found a bug that is apparently widely known in this version, and that's the lock screen comes up even if you disable it in settings. I've tried all kinds of permutations to shut it off, no dice. I can't find any way to edit the row of icons on the lock screen, either. The solution has been to download the
No Lock app & widget from the Play Store. I had used it on my original Galaxy S Showcase back when there was no way to disable it in Froyo.
The Gallery app has changed, but also seems slightly deprecated as Photos now takes over some more photo browsing tasks. After reboot, the Gallery app's icon was missing in GO Launcher and I had to delete and re-add it to the home screen.
Zoe is now available on the HTC camera. I haven't quite figured it out, yet. It saves a high quality short animation to the phone, but I can't seem to send it to anyone as an MMS or as a Facebook post. They can be converted to animated GIFs but the one I did as a test was still too big for MMS.
As mentioned in another post, Google Camera now works but it seems to lack any useful settings to be edited. The few pics I took while playing with it came out blurry and dull.
The stock music player is improved, IMHO. When browsing by album, cover art is a little more front and center. The information contained in the notification window is unchanged, but there's now an added time circle surrounding the pause button, showing song progress. A nice touch.
Some other minor quirks include the NFL Mobile app turning itself back active after upgrading (I had it disabled previously so it wouldn't nag for updates), and a few apps have shown some redundant notifications when running. Most notable is my little Music EQ app, which puts a permanent entry in the notification window while it's running. Now, I have two. One brings up the app, one goes to the app's settings. If I disable "show notifications" BOTH entries disappear
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Last but certainly not least is a very welcome little surprise. The screen no longer lights up when a charger is attached or it's set down on a wireless charger. I had been rather disappointed that the phone would light up when placed on my TYLT charger, and also light up at random through the night as the charging cycles kicked in and out. Hopefully this will cure that and I can move it to my bedside.
Oh, and after upgrade I got an immediate update to Wallet and it says we can now use NFC payments, bypassing the locked down Verizon thingy completely. Huzzah
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