[AT&T Samsung Galaxy Note I717] c_martini:
Moving back from a CM 10.1 based rom to stock once the new JB update was released by At&t, I knew there would be a slight sacrifice in speed when going back to the TouchWiz UI. I was willing to take that small hit to get the s-pen and other stuff back. I have noticed a few things about this update and I am on the fence as far as whether or not to stick with it or go back to a CM 10.1 based or other ROM:

Pros:

* The Nature UI on TouchWiz is pretty. The slight drop shadows under app icons and some widgets is nice.

* I like the S-Pen stuff, though to be honest, I don't use it all that often.

* The sound quality seems to be improved on this update. Not sure why, but everything sounds better - music, calls, notifications.

* This stock ROM seems to handle the screen colors better. There is less of that annoying AMOLED color banding effect that drives me nuts on most other ROMs (I am a web and graphics designer, so these aesthetic things bother me).

* Signal Quality - It seems the signal is stronger and I do like knowing the difference between a regular 4g and an LTE signal. It seems the modem firmware is also better (which I installed along with this update) and quicker at locking on to a data connection.

Cons:

* TouchWiz UI is really quite out of date when you consider all the advancements Google has made to Android since version 4.1 as far as grouping of icons, project butter etc. It seems that not much has improved overall on Samsung's TouchWiz since the previous update.

* My phone really lags as far as overall performance. Some of this is most likely due to TouchWiz, but opening apps, going to task manager and other processes is painfully slow and annoying. Forget trying to open the camera app in a pinch when you want to shoot a candid. By the time the camera is ready to shoot, the moment is gone.

* The leds under the menu buttons are not used for notifications - It seems silly to me that Samsung or At&t would not take advantage of this functionality that most third party ROMs do. If my phone is in a separate room on vibrate or mute and I receive a text or call, I will not know this until I actually pick up the phone and turn on the display. That is silly.

* Battery Life - sucks period. This seems worse with the update.

I guess what I am trying to do here is find a reason to stick with this update and perhaps make improvements based on others opinions here. I think the most important issue would be improving the speed/responsiveness of the system overall.

I have been following some of the other offerings available as far as third party ROMs based off the official Samsung/AT&T 4.1.2 version. Padawan is one such ROM which had quite a bit of attention in the forum.

There are some solutions which others have reported which make noticeable speed improvements in general:

* Deodexing - I think this is possible on a rooted device with a stock ROM, but most just install a ROM which is already deodexed. I wonder how much improvement in performance is noted after this is done.

* Debloating - Removing unnecessary apps that the carrier has decided to include to increase value to the customer. I am not sure what improvement in performance this really offers as to affect performance negatively, these apps would need to be running in the background all the time, right?

* Go with a vanilla generic Android ROM which does not have the TouchWiz UI over it, such as something CM based. As nice as the speed improvements are in doing that, I still would love to keep my s-pen sensitivity and features on the odd occasions when I do use the s-pen.

Anyhow, enough of my long winded post. I am just really curious as to what others think.