[Galaxy Note II General] BarryH_GEG:
Your logic would be much more applicable if there weren't real-world examples of next-gen SoCs and 1080P displays outperforming 720P devices they replaced. Between the SGS3<>SGS4 the battery size increased 19% (2100mAh vs. 2600 mAh). The SGS4's GSMArena endurance rating went up 32%. Which means in spite of the larger display with higher PPI and a more powerful CPU and GPU something allowed the SGS4 to achieve 13% more efficiency that's not attributable to the battery size increase. So with the N3’s 7% larger battery and a similar 13% gain it’ll be 20% better on battery life than the N2. Assuming Qualcomm's Envelope Wrapper really does what it says and delivers up to 30% more power savings then the N3’s battery performance will be even stronger. We’ll see when GSMArena evaluates it.

It has nothing to do with a VPN and is 100% device resident. Here's a practical example. It allows people to put their XXX videos and SnapChat in a separate part of the phone and their presence would go unknown to all but the phone owner. It also gives the phone owner control of the bootloader so that they can prevent the phone from being wiped which would aid in recovery if it were lost or stolen.

Why would people upgrade to any of the new devices? They all have similar upgrades to their predecessors that the N3 has against the N2. Being made of metal isn't revolutionary; it's stylistic. Two frontal facing speakers were introduced by Samsung on the G-Tab 2. "Ultrapixels" which are nothing more than larger photosites were introduced by Nokia. A couple of pages back I listed a slew of new features on the N3 that I found compelling. You don't find them compelling. SGS3 owners didn't find the SGS4's features compelling but Samsung will sell 80M on an annualized basis. So somebody other than current owners are the target audience for the N3 anyway.

It's a pretty long list and in no particular order. I'll be happy to explain how I use them if anyone’s interested but I won't defend why I use them because my needs may be different than someone else's and I’m pretty happy with my routine(s).

S Pen/S Note extremely heavily

Hand-writing recognition and Quick Command; the latter I use a lot.

Page Buddy

Pop up Note

Multiwindow

Voice Control for unlocking from the home screen in to specific apps

S Beam for sharing content with other Galaxy users

Smart Stay/Smart Rotation

Voice Control to manage the camera, music player, handle incoming calls, and alarms

Samsung Link to create a personal network to manage content on all my Samsung and non-Samsung devices via Wi-Fi and 3G

AirView/Hover

Samsung's excellent Exchange client

Samsung Music (cloud subscription)

AllShare Cast using Samsung's Dongle and my Samsung Smart TVs where it's in-built

SmartView to control my Samsung TVs and play content from my TV on my device (different than what's playing on the TV)

WatchON to find programming (broadcast, subscription, and pay), control my Samsung TVs, and play content from my TV (what's playing on the TV) on my device

S Voice, especially over BT

The persistent clipboard which is more of a scrapbook that allows me to capture stuff and use it across apps

Sketch Artist and My Scraps for managing, manipulating and altering content

All the Motion Controls

Lasso to capture, manipulate, and size content I find on the web or in other apps.

Snappier at what? Transitions, screen drawing, app opening? And by what, milliseconds? I just gave you a laundry list of things I use on my phone that make me more productive and allow me to do things either in fewer steps, less time, or in ways otherwise not possible. That to me is "speed;" not celebrating a millisecond gain in swiping across home pages. I truly wonder if people hung up on your definition of "speed" actually use their devices for anything but a laboratory experiment. Because if they actually spent any time in apps doing anything they wouldn’t have time to get-off on how fast their transitions are and how they got another 100 points in a benchmark score. I always used custom ROMs before the N2 because they were needed performance wise. None of the current high-end phones "need" outside help to perform well. And performing "better" is subjective.