when you get it in your hands, run the battery out till it shuts down, then, put it on the charger and turn it on (it may take a few times as its tricky) or pull it off after 2min and power on, reconnect, and leave the phone alone to charge! this lets the phone know the stats to your battery (takes like 4-6hrs to full charge)
as far as apps, apex or nova launcher are awesome, not too many frills, i havent had one force close on me yet. i utilize google wallet myself, and there will be updates after 5min of service connected, go ahead and update, depending on what carrier your on, you might want to hold out on the last one (i believe there is a count of 3-4) if you dont want to pay for wifi tethering, easytether usb from the playstore is working for me, no bugs, wifi or cell data. and DONT get the facebook app, its garbage, like to run consistently even with it never loading (settings) it still seems to. swiftkey3 if you dont have it, the predictive and auto correct is garbage on sammy keyboard.... or perfect keyboard, i bought the paid for swiftkey, awesome!
if you do decide to root, read everything carefully and make sure you are using the proper flash for cwm, a quad/dual, gsm/cdma etc flash is all it takes to get a fancy paperweight, and last, if you do go down that road, MAKE A BACK UP. in the past i have had to stress this to alot of people, but it seems like they are learning.
welcome!
enjoy your device as this is one sure beast!
