Hey all, been awhile since i've been around. So it looks like a new generation of Note is here once again and once again, I find myself wondering if its worth shelling out the money to pay off the remaining "half" of my Note 3 cost with T-mobile through the Jump! program as I don't have a full year of payments on my Note 3 as I got in in March this year.
I've been a Note user since Note 1 after I left VZW to get it on ATT and by far, the Note 1 was my favorite of them all. The Note 2 was pretty good over all but the lag on the Touchwiz was annoying and the camera was a bit less friendly and by far, the Note 3 has been the worse with T-Mobile. I had to go through THREE phones with T-Mobile due to the HORRENDOUS battery life loss after Kit Kat was installed on the Note 3 on T-Mobile.
Yes, I did EVERYTHING I could to help troubleshoot the following issues from clean cache wipes, to reformatting the SD card, to resetting the entire phone ect..ect.. but the following are STILL issues with my Note 3 that I'm wondering that are FIXED and or are IMPROVED with the Note 4 on T-Mobile before I decide to shell out $200 plus Tax to switch to a Note 4 or just wait until next year and see what Sony or HTC has out that may end my Note ownership days.
1. Continual droppage and reconnecting of Wifi at home. No matter what i've done and no matter what wifi network I connect to, my Note 3 continually just "drops" and "reconnects" to wifi, and YES I have taken off the smart switch. This problem has been continual even after 3 Note 3 replacements. Using a Asus N66U with 3 other wireless devices that have no issues on 5ghz and 2.4ghz. Note 3 issues with mine continue no matter what location including:
Various starbucks,
University campus
Bus stops
Restaurants.
Sisters house
2. Horrendous camera quality. My Note 1 would take awesome photos, even in low light situations. My Note 3's camera quality all around is outright terrible. 90% of my decent indoor lighting shots are blurry or smudged, and you can pretty much guess that low light shots are utter crap all around with very high amounts of ISO grain noise and not to mention poor contrast and outline of subjects. Only in very nice, outside sunlight days does my Note 3 give me decent quality shots. Beyond that, it sucks, VERY hard.
3. Crap battery life. Most likely due to KitKat software issue that STILL HAS NOT been fixed with T-Mobile. This has been a known issue about Kitkat 4.4.3/4.4.2 since earlier this year and im wondering if 4.4.4 has fixed this issue, especially on T-Mobile.
4. SLOW SD response/reading/writing. I've used two Class 10 microSD cards from Samsung and Sandisk and photo browsing/copying/deleting on local phone or over USB 3.0 and i've been really dissapointed on the overaul performance of Note 3's ability to use a high quality SD card.
Any information, incite or feedback would help me decide if I should ditch my Note 3 and its crappy issues or suck it up until next year and see if HTC M9 Prime or Sony Xperia Ultra 2 prove to be worth giving up on the Note lineup and Samsung in general.