I've been on the Note 3 since it was released, and even when I got it I figured my next phone would probably be the Note 5. I figured that would be enough time for enough improvements to be made for it to be worth it. And I'd been looking forward more and more to when that day came, until the past couple of months - when it started to become clear that Samsung was apparently losing its mind. They don't seem to have recognized something crucial - that the way to keep a good product going, and growing in popularity, is to be VERY CAUTIOUS about doing anything to remove features that existing owners value greatly. Yes, the Note 5 has some nice improvements - better camera, faster wired and wireless charging, the external keyboard case, the S-Pen being able to write directly on the screen without waking the phone up. Great stuff! But..... Eliminating the microSD slot? So you HAVE to rely on the 'cloud' to quickly take up all those wonderful pics and videos that nice camera will take? As if the 'cloud' is everywhere. It isn't even close. If Samsung makes sure that carriers offer their users the 128GB model Note 5, that is the only way they can come even close to making up for such a huge miscalculation on their part.
Also, imprisoning the battery inside the case - so that you can't spend 1 minute swapping out an empty battery for a full one? Or installing an aftermarket battery that's three times larger than the stock one? I'm sure the Note 5 is more power efficient than its predecessors, but how has Samsung missed that there still isn't ANYONE out there who is so pleased with their device's battery capacity that they wouldn't see it as a huge blunder to REDUCE battery capacity in a new device model - no matter what the rationale. Inexplicable.
And how could they miss the boat on updating their USB hardware to Type C?? That should have been a no-brainer, mandatory incremental improvement.
Finally, 4GB of RAM is fantastic, but now that we know how much of that RAM is already in use immediately after booting up the baseline system, it's clear they must have found it necessary to add the extra RAM in order to give people at least a similar amount of free RAM available as the previous models. Yes, the added size of the new system software in RAM is probably a result of the added S-Pen and other improved features, but nonetheless, it still ends up looking like a missed opportunity to improve the device for the user's additional desire/needs for a larger amount of free RAM over past models.
Samsung seems to be making the classic mistakes of initially having great success because they got lucky and clever with their innovations, and then inevitably becomes unable to maintain the same mix of executives and staff, corporate intelligence, and vision to sustain that for more than a few years, before... going into frustrating decline. Ugh.
