[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] gabster21:
After jumping from the Galaxy Nexus to the Note 2, I realize that there are so many improvements that Touchwiz brings on top of stock Android that heavily outweighs being a version "behind". I used to visit the GNex forum almost exclusively, still I decided to move to the note for the bigger screen, awesome battery life and SD card slot "despite" it having Touchwiz, I thought I would bite the bullet and live with the horror of an OEM skin.. now I realize that the phone is much better off with it on top of Android.

Pros:

- Camera is way better with a lot more options, notably burst mode and widescreen.. why does stock force you to take 4:3 pictures? this isn't 1998 anymore, all monitors/TVs are widescreen

- Gallery is much improved with different view types, video previews, play on hover, etc..

- FB contact integration out of the box, no need to mess around with Haxsync or other apps

- Multi-window, that alone trumps stock

- T9 Dialer

- Smart stay: When reading long text I got used to touching my screen every 30 seconds to keep it from turning off, never again

- Smart rotate: call this a "gimmick" all you want, but it's really nice to be able to lie down and read something without first disabling auto-rotate

- Contact list: smoothly integrated with the Phone app, no more ugly white theme that's oddly out of place with the rest of the UI

- S-Beam is much faster and more practical than Android Beam (you have both in Touchwiz anyway)

- Not counting all the s-pen apps since those are specific to the Note 2

- Overall feel of the OS feels less segmented and more cohesive

- Loads of small improvement all across the OS, things that make you say "oh nice, I don't need 4-5 steps to do that anymore"

* I know that "there's an app for that" for some of these features, but they will never work as seamlessly as on a single unified framework.

Cons:

- The TW launcher is smooth but limited (so is the stock JB launcher), running Nova lets you customize it as you like while keeping all the TW advantages.

- Some features are more gimmicky like "pan to zoom" or "double tap to top of list" but you can just ignore them and use the normal way of doing things.

Nexus fans (I was one of them) keep braggin about how their phones run "pure, untouched, sweet, [...] unadulterated, vanilla Android" as if it was a huge advantage, claiming Touchwiz is ball-and-chain bloatware that slows down the phone.. well if you call the Note 2 slow then you need to get your head checked. I'm aware that it's got twice the processing power of the current Nexus, but my point is that Touchwiz does not slow it down one bit.

Read this on another forum:

"Samsung gets a lot of hate for TouchWiz, and so they should - its bad, unbelievably bad, colossally bad. Its as far away from Android as can be in terms of looks.

On the Note 2, however, TouchWiz is fantastic, Samsung made the improvements where it counts for the device’s tablet aspects. The S-Pen is really useful, as is the software Samsung developed for it. The multi-tasking is so good, you wouldn’t think Samsung had it in them to do it. I just recently got the software update over the air for the dual window multi-tasking and tested it out this morning - it’s just great and I cannot fault it one little bit. I hate to say it but I don’t even feel like wanting an AOSP ROM for this device because I stand to lose so many features in regards to the S-Pen."

I don't care about not getting 4.2 or whatever 4.n+1 will be right away, Samsung has done a wonderful job with Touchwiz on the Note 2 and I'd rather have them take their time to build on top of what they have right now then release something quick and dirty.

Are there any advantages to stock Android besides having faster access to the latest AOSP version? Please don't reply with "this is what Google intended it to be" or "the hardware is made for the software" (as if the Note 2 isn't made for TW), I'm talking about features, performance, reliability.

btw, before buying the GNex I had a Galaxy S1, so I was extremely biased against TW before buying the Note 2.. the latest version is much less in your face and just feels like an extra coat of polish on top of stock rather than a hostile takover.