Looking forward to what you report back with
Well I did the dreaded FDR yesterday, and after installing all necessary updates to the stock apps, I tried again and thought I fixed the problem. I was able to go 5 whole minutes of streaming music over WiFi to my BT speaker. After 5 minutes, it went back to it's annoyances of cutting out. 3 seconds of music, 5 second pause over and over again. I tried this on my BT speaker and the BT audio in my car. Same cut out lag in the car. I did a speadtest with WiFi and BT on, and results were under 1 meg down and about 2 megs up. With BT off, ran spead test again on WiFi, and results were 29 megs down and 8 megs up.
Also been having really poor voice signal at my house where about 20% of my day at home is no signal. This of course makes my battery drain fast. After the FDR, I had 9% time with no signal at home. So I'm thinking it's a hardware issue with my phone. My wife has the Note 3 through TMobile and she has better reception than I do, side by side on our couch. I haven't had a chance to test her WiFi and BT yet.
There have been overwhelming reports of apparent hardware trouble after the Note 3 update to Kitkat 4.4.2 - from Signal reception to wifi and bluetooth issues. If you didn't have trouble before the update, this may well be the problem. I've addressed this under a signal issues thread.
You may well find, as I did, a sympathetic carrier rep who will get you a replacement warranty Note 3 and exchange out your old one after backing it up. The replacement should come with the original 4.3 OS installed, which worked great for all of us from the get go. A Samsung rep in my Verizon store rather quietly suggested they know there's an issue. and Verizon blames Samsung who blames Google for the new Kitkat prob's. It could weeks or months to get an OS fix perhaps in 4.4.3, but those of who need to use our phones in weaker signal areas are outraged. BUT my replacement phone with 4.3 works just fine. It too wants to upgrade itself to 4.4.2, but you don't have to let it. You can stay at 4.3. The new 4.4.2 OS installation file is downloaded to a "cache folder" that you can empty. When phone is off, hold Vol UP button, Menu button and Power button at the same time. It boots into Recovery mode and gives you a half dozen choices. Choose wipe cache. And then the reboot choice. When the phone returns to operational mode, you'll see the ornery Install new OS message, and now when you hit Install, you've beat the system. Phone will turn off as though it's about to install 4.4.2 and put you back into the previous Recovery mode. But doesn't do anything. Hit reboot. You'll now get a message that the OS update failed. Yay! Have to do this every several days to stay with 4.3, Jelly Bean. You can't otherwise go back to an older OS without Rooting.
My phone is a company work phone, so Rooting is definitely out of the question. I did talk to my IT guy and he suggested basically what you are, about calling a customer service rep. He said he and I can call together since it's a corporate account, and since we have a 1 year warranty on my phone which expires in October, I may be able to get them to send me a refurb. Well my thoughts on that aren't too exciting. I always fear that you never know what you're going to get in return. Back in the day a coworker of mine had neverending problems with his Droid Bionic. He went through 5 of them in 2 months before he got one that wasn't a lemon. Uggg. I don't want that headache.
I've also been told that any replacement phone VZW would send would have the newest OS equipped, so I don't think I'd have any luck getting JB back, and will be stick with KK. Hopefully Sammy will push out another update to fix the radio issue, as it seems many VZW Note 3's from the first release have had antenna issues.
I never tried the WiFi BT streaming before I got KK, so I'm not sure if the update made a difference or not. As far as voice signal, I think it's gotten a little worse. I don't remember having as much downtime with JB.
That's what really irks me. When you update anything on android, there's no restoring back to older versions of the OS, or any app that I know of, unless of course you are rooted. Because of that, I'm always nervous when I see any updates come through for anything now. I guess I could just opt out and not do any of those updates, I'll just get annoyed with the notifications though, and the thought that I may be missing out on cool new features.
I try to rely on other users feedback to updates before I update mine, but it's so diverse, I never know what to believe. Everyone seems to have their own likes/dislikes.
