[T-Mobile Galaxy Note 4 Android Development] polish_pat:
Here it is:

ROMs are a thing of the present and the future, at least for us, Samsung users. I love my Samsung device, but since my first Galaxy, the S2 LTE, I have realized that there is no way to ignore the fact that TouchWiz can be a little too much at times. By the skinned nature of touchwiz, even one of the most high end phone like the Note 4 can't always handle it smoothly so people like me, thankfully, have alternatives that can close the gap in performance between the stock ROM and stock Android. I have never been a guy that enjoyed Vanilla Android, or even heavily modified ROMs so I have always been looking for a near stock TouchWiz experience with some performance improvements. If you are like me, then Rapture by iB4STiD is for you.

There are two versions of this ROM, Standard and Extreme. Because I have only used the 2.1 Extreme version, my review will be solely based on that. This ROM is what Samsung should have released in the first place. It keeps a 100% stock experience and adds many tweaks and improvements under the hood. The first thing we see when installing the ROM is it's SILKY SMOOTH; It's responsive and overall feels better to handle the many widgets and apps I throw at it. The ROM is also thinned of a lot of the cluttering apps and features imposed by Samsung. The good thing is, the dev allows the user to chose if you wants or not the features that were thinned down with a simple flash in recovery. This ROM also takes out almost all T-Mobile signature apps and feature so that it allows almost anybody with a snapdragon based Note 4 to use it. Usually after a few weeks of use, ROMs tend to clutter up and start to lose their performance, but after more that 1 month of use, this ROM shows no signs of slowing down. It's as smooth and responsive as Day 1.

The Battery life on this thing is stellar; I regularly get between 5-6 hours of SOT (Screen On Time). I usually unplug my phone around 8am and use it through out the day with medium use; some facebooking, some emails, a few calls, SMSs, some Candy Crush and Youtube during my breaks, just to name a few. By the time I get home, I have between 2 and 3 hours of SOT and have about 60-70% left. It's also note worthy that I have a Gear 2 connected at all times. I also am on LTE most of the day as my mobile connection is much faster than any WiFi I can connect to away from home. One day, I came home to a power outage; that night there was a hokey game. I used my GameCenter Live subscription to stream the game at home, thats a full 2.5 hours of screen time + streaming on LTE with 2 bars of signal and after the game, my SOT was close to 7h and still had close to 20% left.

In conclusion, if like me, you dislike the heavy visual modifications that are present in most other ROMs, and want a stock experience with all the performance and battery life you can expect from such a high end device, then Rapture 2 is for you. iB4STiD has done an amazing job. I have used his ROMs for a few years and have never been disappointed. Not only does he code great ROMs, he also takes care of them by being actively implicated in his threads and constantly trying to help his users.