[AT&T Samsung Galaxy Note I717] byron84:
Howdy yall,

First I want to thank all the hard working people making all these crazy ROMs. This place has been a fantastic resource as I started messing around with my Note.

My first smartphone was the TELUS Samsung Galaxy SIIX (SGH-989D). Like the Note, it was given a beautiful SAMOLED and dual core 1.5 snapdragon. My SIIX shipped with Gingerbread 2.3.5, which I never bothered to upgrade. It ran GB beautifully, hardly a stutter to be found anywhere. When I damaged it a bit, I decided to upgrade to the Note instead of fixing/replacing the SIIX. When I got the SIIX I thought it was massive (4.5"). When I got the Note, hooooooly, it seemed comically large and made the SIIX look like a baby.

Having said that, I've finally gotten used to the Note's size and realized how awesome it is. I was expecting an experience similar to the SIIX. I was sorely disappointed as the Note felt much, MUCH laggier. The Note shipped with Gingerbread 2.3.6. When I heard of the ICS upgrade, I figured I'd give that a chance instead of changing to the S3.

I tried one of the basic ICS ROMs from here. While certain aspects appeared to be significantly smoother, other areas weren't and I wasn't really impressed. I then tried the FJ ROM which was pretty cool, but still wasn't really what I was hoping for. I then tried the Electron ROM which wasn't too bad. I had heard (good things) of Paranoid Android. When I tried that, I was at first confused because I could not get Google Play or anything. I finally read enough to realize I had to flash the gapps myself, which was fine. However, I could not get the camera to work properly in that one which was a deal breaker (it was the unofficial ROM though).

I tried "The Collective - AoCP - CP1", and it was by far the most impressive. Everything seemed so much snappier, sslauncher was really cool too. For some reason, regardless of the ROM, apex launcher just lags too much to be acceptable for a 1.5GHz device IMO.

I tried flashing one of the overclock kernels, and I thought I had bricked the Note. It would stay stuck at "SAMSUNG" when booting up. I was still able to get into CWM, but all the previously working ROMs would fail despite wiping everything multiple times. I finally found a stock ROM in TAR format and flashed it using Odin, which got me up and running again. However I'm still not able to flash other ROMs for some reason, I wonder if I've permanently messed something up.

For some reason I was never able to get the official ICS update to work through the OTA process. I managed to find a proper stock TELUS 4.0.4 ROM and flash that via Odin, but still I'm left somewhat puzzled. I don't have the ICS Camera or the ICS Gallery! My SMS looks like it did in Gingerbread, not like any of the ICS ROMs I played with. Phone dialer and Contacts list look the same, though I'm not sure the stock ICS update made many changes to those.

I feel that ICS (let alone JB) has a lot of promise, I'm just trying to find the best setup. I would like to have a nice ROM that has none of the bloat (official TELUS ROM is 500+MB where some perfectly featured ROMs are 100MB+). However, I DON'T want to sacrifice critical functionality or stability. Is this wishful thinking?

Sorry if this was long winded, but any comments or input would be awesome. I've been having a blast, the Note is one sweet smartphone...errr... phablet? :D