[Galaxy Note GT-N7000 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] tdodd:
If all goes well I don't see why you shouldn't get the phone by Monday if you order on Wednesday, although maybe don't leave ordering till 22:00 or so as I did.

The only fly in the ointment I'm seeing is reports that Belgium is getting involved in some of the orders. That seems to be slowing things down for some people. At the prices on offer I am sure amazon.de is getting hit from all sides with orders. If your order is time critical then I'd say don't leave it too late for the sake of a couple of Euros. You've still got to get the things charged and configured before you can get cracking with it, and that's before you have a look at the S-Pen features.

As for the NFC I'm not sure how I'd tell. What do I look for? I've found nothing in the UK manual and no obvious signs on the phone itself.

As for first impressions....

- Well compared to my ZTE Blade it looks huge, but the larger screen was the most significant factor in the upgrade. In trouser pockets no issue at all. In today's shirt pocket it slips in easily enough but protrudes about 1.5" - Quite handy if I want to wander around videoing people in a semi-covert fashion. Pretty useless if I want to feel sure that the phone won't make a dramatic bid for freedom.

- The screen itself is delicious. :)

- Mostly it zips along nicely and is plainly a vast improvement over the speed of my Blade.

- Big keyboard is very easy to use. No mistyping so far.

- I really hate the placement of the power button. It should be on top. End of. Placing it opposite the volume controls is even more stupid.

- When awakening the phone there is a major lag before the unlock screen appears. It is very irritating.

- USB charging from my laptop cannot keep pace with the power demands of the phone if I am actively using it. The battery level drops even with 500mA being supplied - no real surprise, but worth pointing out. For something like satnav in a car during daytime this thing is going to need a proper 1000mA supply, I think. Lucky I have one.

- Coming from Cyanogenmod 7.1 it's taking a while to find my way around everything and I'm irritated by features that seem to be missing.

- I don't seem able to restore my Titanium backups from my SD card. The app doesn't see them. Not a big drama, but it's taken a while to manually configure things. Of course, I had to root it to get TB working.

- I think I'm going to have to get the official desk dock, which is listing at £30 at Mobile Fun. I'm sick of wires getting in the way of everything and having to hold it while fiddling.

- I don't know what the Market is doing, but restoring my apps was a very half baked effort. Only around 8 out of 33 apps made an appearance and I had to manually reinstall the rest and configure by hand.

- Satellite lock is quick and assured, even indoors. No problems getting a lock with several different GPS apps.

- I haven't yet found any apps that look daft with the big hi res screen, but Maverick (mapping app) had a hissy fit for a bit and map tiles were flashing on and off like a disco dance floor. Sliding the map around seemed to cure that.

- I haven't found any serious (insurmountable) problems so far other than the positioning of the power button. I don't get that at all.

It's going to take a while longer to get to grips fully with this beast. I think tomorrow I will start to go through the manual.