[AT&T Samsung Galaxy Note I717] nheacock:
My take on the Note for theROMinator

I can speak to both of these from my perspective being 3 weeks into my 30 days to return.

I'm pretty much a power user and use nearly all aspects of the phone on a daily basis: Phone, email, web, SMS/MMS, tethering, maps/GPS/nav, calendar, alarm, camera/video, music/audiobooks, bluetooth headset, bluetooth car stereo, weather, youtube, etc...

- The screen is awesome. (duh)

- The feature set of ICS is great and definitely superior to GB on all points I mentioned above (IMHO)

- All features work (minus one minor one I'll mention below)

- The camera capture isn't instant, but pert near (under 1 sec to execute)

- The camera does do autofocus as well as depth of field (without putting it in Macro mode... nice!)

- Black Star vII is my personal favorite of the dozen or so times I've flashed this thing in the last couple of weeks. That's completely subjective of course. There are great features to the various ROMs.

Even though this is an awesome phone and I'd give it 4 out of 5 stars (maybe 4.5), I've considered returning it and I'll share why.

- It seems a tad underpowered for the screen resolution. Even though it's smooth, it definitely drops frames. Mostly in apps and less (almost none) in the launchers/settings (I'm using Apex). Some apps scroll so badly that it's painful to use them. That's been few though. Most apps are great. I'm just saying. If it happens that your favorite app runs lousy (as in my situation) it makes it more painful to use the phone and more interested in returning it. Overclocking the processor (I don't think this is available right now) and app developers who optimize their apps for a higher rez screen will likely solve the problem as things move in this direction. But because of this problem, as I use the phone it feels like I'm sacrificing some power/fluidity across the board compared to the Infuse with Aeon 1.5.

- Similarly, the phone with ICS has some kind of buffer lag. It's annoying to push a button, it doesn't respond, so you push it again only to do it right as the first push executes and the other click does something odd. That happens fairly frequently where it was very rare on my Infuse. So I just need to slow down on the phone a little (which only draws attention to it being a bit underpowered).

- There is no real solution right now for voice control. S Voice is pretty much a joke. Compared to either Voice Dialer or Choice Dialer, it's considerably slower, requires internet access, fails to execute accurately interpreted commands, and *far* less accurate in general. Maybe that's not an issue for you, but it's pretty significant for me as my hands are frequently busy when I need to make a call. I'm chomping at the bit for functional voice control.

- The only thing I'm aware of that actually doesn't work at all (on any of the ROMs I've tried) is the custom vibrate patterns in Handscent or Go SMS to differentiate text messages vibrations from calls. This is useful, but not critical and it will probably be fixed at some point.

So, having said all of that (and I'm sure some people will disagree with my assessment, and I hope it doesn't sound like I'm bashing the phone or something), I'm pretty sure that I'm going to keep the Note. I think we're just in the early stages of ICS on the Note and things will only improve from here.

ICS is really cool and has better features then GB. It would be hard to go back to GB even after only a few weeks with this. The screen resolution tweaks to the screen (not available in this ROM I don't think) really make great use of the real estate (I prefer to use more screen then have larger text/icons).

I'm hopeful for the future of this phone. I saw it happen in the Infuse. It behaved almost the same way when I first got it, but as development improved, speed tweaks and overclocking was developed, it became the most awesome phone I'd ever had. The Note has the same kind of promise and I'm optimistic. I'm looking forward to ultimately feeling like it's a 5 star phone and at this point, I feel like the underpowered issue is pretty minor because it's mostly fast and pretty fluid.

One last thing (I know... this is horribly long!) but my local ATT stores have a fully functioning phone and I was able to try it out, download and install apps on it and try them (then I uninstalled them out of respect). That really helped me make my decision and I'd encourage you to find a working test model and do the same.

Sorry so long,

-Neil