Back to Samsung after a few years

[breynolds007]

After a pretty poor overall experience with the Galaxy Nexus on Verizon, I switched to Motorola phones and have been pretty happy with them. The Nexus suffered from a host of problems including poor signal and battery life. I've never been a touch wiz fan (as it just seemed to make the phone lag) and Motorola has been keeping their devices closer to stock Android, which I usually prefer. My last phone, the original Moto X was a very good phone despite not having anything fantastic about it.

I almost upgraded to the new Moto X but felt it wasn't much different. I've really been considering a phablet and was going to get a Nexus 6, but it's still not available for VZW and appears to be having a lot of issues. The more I read great things about the Note 4, the more I wanted to give it a shot.

And, I'm sure glad I did! This phone is head and shoulders above the Moto X I was using. It's fast, the camera is fantastic, S Pen is cool and Touch Wiz is actually very useful and doesn't seem to hinder it all. After a couple of days, I'm already pretty used to the size (one of my big concerns). Other "regular size" phone screens seem tiny to look at. This is the first phone I've had in years that I've been excited to use...It just seems to have everything built right into it. Being a fan of vanilla android, I never thought I would prefer a Touch Wiz phone, but my mind has been changed. I am looking forward to Lollipop to bring Active notifications (like Moto) as they are really nice compared to the old flashing light. I've only been using it a couple days, so I hope I don't start running into issues later but for now I'm really impressed. For those that have had it a few months, is it still running smooth?

 

[Palmetto Fellow]

I got mine around Thanksgiving, and it's as smooth today as it was the day I bought it. Battery life is also excellent. You'd think with such a large screen that it would just suck the juice, but I've found that my screen uses less than 4% of the battery per hour.

 

[breynolds007]

That's great to hear, it's a fantastic phone and I hope it remains smooth and stable for a long while.

 

[AntimonyER]

I'm in same boat as you, swore off Samsung after the GNex. But had an upgrade and the Note 4 was half off, so I gave it a try. Signal strength is the best I've ever seen in a phone on VZW, and they even have the 3G - LTE hand off done pretty well. Still not a fan of touch wiz though.

 

[Wilkas]

I'm not a fan if I'm honest, i do appreciate the larger screen but I'm not a fan of touchwiz and the unbelievable amount of bloatware on this phone. With the specs in this phone i feel it should be blisteringly fast but it feels laggy and slow compared to the nearly 2 year old HTC One M7 I upgraded from. The camera seems to take an age to focus and tbh I thought I'd been sent a dud however my partner just upgraded to an S5 and hers is virtually the same.

I have to admit having both the HTC One X and then the One M7 I miss the simplicity of sense and that may be colouring my view a little, little things like having speakers on the front & the build quality are big misses for me and if the next one does away with the poor ultra pixel camera I'll be trading this in against it.. I gave it a try but Samsung just aren't for me.