its when viewing dark image/movies in the dark...there's this annoying black ink spots that can be seen.
Okay, let me put a movie on mine and watch some dark scenes in a dark room.
Anyways, how you liking the GN2 so far?...old rival old pal....
I never thought of you as a rival. I have a fair number of thoughts about my GNII but I can try to sum up what I think are relevant points.
The only important takeaway message that I can really give to you is that I really can't think of anything wrong with this device, it's really the best phone that I have ever used. It's probably the best phone ever made, so far anyways, and it goes back to my philosophy that a phone is a combination of both hardware and software.
This phone has a very strong hardware spec sheet, but if listed hardware specs were all that mattered we would all be buying Droid DNAs or Nexus 4s. Well, maybe not the Nexus 4, which overheats and throttles itself, defeating the whole purpose of having such a powerful SoC in the first place. Where the GNII absolutely humiliates the Droid DNA and all it's competitors, including stock Android on the Nexus 4 and AOSP ROMs like CM10, is the unbelievable software suite it ships with. The underlying OS is Jelly Bean, but Samsung has really added amazing functionality with TouchWiz + S-Pen and has done so without ruining the fluidity and smoothness of the stock Android OS, unlike for example Sense. And you can have as many apps open as you want in a TouchWiz ROM. I've talked plenty of trash about TouchWiz in the past, but this phone is really something else in terms of the stock TouchWiz ROM.
I'm not going to pretend that TouchWiz isn't often visually chaotic, because it is and it really Fisher-Prices the otherwise classy blue neon Holo stock Android scheme. But if you can look past this, what you'll find is refinement at every level of the Android OS. Everyone knows that Samsung added Notification Panels to TouchWiz sometime in 2009 and Google finally added considerably crummier ones to stock Android in 2012. But the refinements are everywhere you look, from the TouchWiz launcher itself to all the stock apps, which have all been thoughtfully improved on. I don't even want to explain how the stock browser, music player, video player, calendar, alarm clock, weather widget, etc. etc. have been refined, it would take me 3 pages to list all the improvements. Just go to the carrier store and play with one. I don't have any reservations in saying that in terms of functionality, TouchWiz blows stock Android out of the water and it easily surpasses by a wide margin CyanogenMod. (I have CM9 on my Touchpad.)
Then there's the S-Pen. Samsung has taken the ideas first seen in the Note and run with it. You can use the S-Pen everywhere in the OS, from hovering over pages in the web browser (which simulates mouse cursor hover on a desktop PC) to copying and pasting anything you draw a circle around in any app as a screen capture. And yeah, you can draw on your GNII. If I could draw, my phone would become my carry-everywhere sketchbook. Oh well. The S-Pen is something which is fundamentally a remarkable achievement, even if most people don't realize it yet. In this regard Samsung has yet to achieve the kind of cult status that Apple has, if this were an Apple product people would be lining up in the streets and fighting each other in the stores to buy one. It really is that awesome.
Multi-Window is no joke and no gimmick. It's real multi-tasking on a phone. Assuming your app is not programmed to freeze when it loses focus, it happily will run in one half of the screen while you do something with another app on the other half. YouTube really does play on the top of the screen while you browse the web on the bottom. Everything seen in that famous demonstration video is true, that's really how Multi-Window works on my phone.
Oh hell, I'll talk about the hardware too. The 5.5" non-PenTile full-RGB Super AMOLED HD screen is really nice. No, it's not 1080p like the one in the Droid DNA. If you judge your phones based on whether you can see pixels when you hold the phone an inch from your face, the GNII will not win any contests. Otherwise, I prefer the size of the GNII's screen, the infinite contrast ratio and zero black levels, the colors which pop out of the screen, and the superior response time to any LCD. It will be interesting to see if Samsung goes back to PenTile in the 1080p screen in the Galaxy S IV. Full-RGB Super AMOLED HD is something I wouldn't be willing to give up easily now that I've had it. It beats the ever-loving shit out of the already rather nice PenTile 720p screen in my old Galaxy Nexus in both clarity and sharpness despite having a lower PPI.
The 8 MP rear camera is the same as the one in the GSIII. If you like the GSIII's camera, you'll be fine with this one. It's not quite at the level of the iPhone 5's camera, but you won't have a bunch of purple shit everywhere in your photo either with the GNII's camera. It's still the best of the non-iP5 cameras out there, unless you want to buy into Windows Phone 8 and get a Lumia 920. Which you really shouldn't do, this phone runs laps around any device with Windows Phone. You'd be giving up almost everything else to get the camera in the Lumia 920.
Of course, unlike the US GSIII, the US GNII has fundamentally the same hardware as the International GNII. That means it has the Wolfson DAC. Do you listen to your music on your phone? Then you basically only have 3 options for the best sound quality: the iPhone 5, the International (NOT US!) GSIII, and the GNII. All the HTC phones are infected with that Beats Audio trash, and outside of the Sony Xperia devices, there's nothing even in the Wolfson DAC's ballpark in phone audio except iP5, which edges out the Wolfson DAC because of the famous Android hiss. Plus it has a microSD slot, which means you can keep your music collection with you and not have rely on the cloud to store your media. I have a 64 GB microSDXC card in mine. I'm currently toting about 26 GB of music around on my phone, plus when I want to watch a movie I just pop the microSDXC card out, stuff it in my PC, and copy the movie onto it. Fuck, with this much space, I could put a whole anime series on my phone and watch it whenever the fuck I wanted.
Oh right, and then there's the battery. The battery on my GNII outlasts the battery on my Touchpad. Yes, my phone's battery is better than my tablet's. That has to be a record of some kind. It literally gets twice the battery life of the Nexus 4 and Droid DNA. You saw my post previously with my nearly 8 hours of screen on time while connected almost continuously to the LTE network. The battery on this phone makes it actually a useful device. You can take it with you, use Navigation, search for stuff around town, play Ingress, pretty much hammer away on it all day and it will be there for you. You don't have to nurse it along or baby it or charge it halfway through your waking hours and it will last the entire day no matter what you do with it.
It's the first smartphone I've ever owned where I can say, it will last and last all day, even if I shoot a bunch of camera pictures and video for hours, drive around with the GPS enabled, leave Facebook running and syncing all day, play Words With Friends for hours, and anything else I want to do. This phone will still have plenty of juice when you finally plug it into the charger and crawl into bed. What good is a smartphone if actually using it kills the battery? In terms of the battery life, it's the first truly useful smartphone I've ever owned. Period.
So that's the Galaxy Note II. It's the best phone I've ever owned or used or played around with. Oh, and it's rooted now and though there are custom ROMs for all but the Verizon version, you won't want a custom ROM. Trust me on this. This phone is like a tiny God out of the box with TouchWiz.
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