After checking out the original Galaxy Note at Best Buy last year, I was very interested in the large screen and S Pen features, but since it was an AT&T exclusive, I decided to purchase a Galaxy Nexus. The Galaxy Nexus was a great phone, but it felt like Samsung didn't really put all their effort into making it as premium of a device as the Galaxy Note or the Galaxy S II. Fast forward a year later and Verizon has finally started selling some truly fantastic superphones. I bought the HTC Droid DNA, another phenomenal phone, while I was waiting for Verizon to put their branding on the exterior of the phone in three places, but decided to return it to get the Note II. I'll do a little comparison of both phones and explain why I chose the Note II over the Droid DNA.
Screen Droid DNA
Nothing in the world can touch the DNA's 1080p screen. Nothing. No matter how close I got to the screen, I could never see any pixels. Text looked amazing and colors were incredibly accurate. While the Note II has a "measly" 720p panel stretched over a 5.55" display, the screen itself is still significantly better than the Galaxy Nexus. Samsung chose to remove the PenTile pixel arrangement that it chose for the Galaxy Nexus in 2011, a choice that makes text and graphics on the screen appear much smoother. As it is a Super AMOLED HD panel, it is still going to have the fantastic blacks and supersaturated colors of the Galaxy Nexus (unlike the Droid DNA's LCD screen), but I actually don't really mind the saturation. Colors really pop, and since I'm not a professional photographer, I'm not enraged by the slight dip in accuracy for the increase in color intensity. The DNA's screen is clearly better, but the Note II's screen is still very good.
Phone Construction Tie (for different reasons)
Let me preface this section with the statement that the Droid DNA has absolutely incredible build quality. The phone feels very solid and its designers clearly put a great deal of care into its creation. The Galaxy Note II, of course, is made of Samsung's trademark plastic finish. This, unfortunately, feels less solid than the DNA. However, I quickly found problems with the DNA's build, which was one of the reasons I decided to return it. The DNA is made of a mishmash of materials: soft touch matte black polycarbonate on the back, glossy black plastic on the front, red spun metal hairline finish for the buttons, and a different shade of red for the grilles on the sides of the phone. As an aside, these grilles are entirely superfluous, they do not enhance the sound quality of the phone in any way.
After owning my DNA for 10 days, I noticed several things. First, I found several dents in the grilles on the side, something which was rather alarming for a company renowned for its build quality. In addition, the back of the phone started developing scuffs that would not go away when rubbed with a damp cloth. I did not use a case for this phone because I had assumed that the material would be somewhat sturdy, especially considering the level of care I had put into handling it. While the Galaxy Note II is indeed plastic, its exterior is much more scratch and scuff resistant. I have had the Note II for almost a week now and there is nary a mark to be found. Additionally, even if the back does get scratched up somehow, it can always be replaced with a brand new back, as it is user removable (perhaps you could even upgrade to one without two garish Verizon logos on it). I actually really like the "Hyperglaze" finish on the Note II it looks especially handsome in dark gray. It adds something very sophisticated to the Note II's exterior that was definitely missing in my old Galaxy Nexus. The Droid DNA is slightly more comfortable to hold than the Note II, but for a 5.55" phone, Samsung really did a good job in making it as ergonomic as possible. Also, Samsung's button placement is far superior to HTC's. Who would ever decide to put the power button on the top of such a tall phone?? Oh wait, HTC and Apple...
Internals Note II
Both phones have quad core processors (Snapdragon S4 Pro for the DNA, Samsung's own Exynos 4 for the Note II) which excel at annihilating lag. They also have 2 GB of ram, although I think the Note II utilizes it better than the DNA (which has to deal with the overly-vigilant multitask killing in HTC Sense 4+). They both have GSM/CDMA/LTE radios, which is a nice addition if you want to use your phone globally in addition to getting great LTE service in the US. I got great reception everywhere I went with both phones, definitely better than the poor radios in the Galaxy Nexus.
Each phone comes with an 8MP rear camera, both of which take excellent pictures. They both have numerous features, including a rapid shot mode, but Samsung has significantly more. These extra features may be of limited use, but they are still fun to play around with. The Droid DNA has a wide angle lens for its front facing camera, so you can have more people in your Facebook shots, but the Note II's front facing camera isn't bad by any means.
After this is where the phones really start to differ. Although each phone comes with 16 GB of storage, the Note II, thanks to its removable back, has an SD card slot allowing for a MicroSD card of up to 64 GB. I heard that Verizon forced HTC to offer only one 16 GB version of the Droid DNA with no SD card slot (unlike the Japanese version of the phone) because they want their customers to use more cloud based services (and of course rake in the money from tiered data caps). The Note II comes with a 3100 mAh battery, while the Droid DNA has a paltry 2020 mAh one, meaning that the Note II's battery is 1.5 times as large. In addition, Samsung gave the Note II a removable battery, a nice feature to have if you need a fully charged phone right after draining the battery. Fun fact, the battery of the Note II is the size of the iPhone 4S's entire screen.
The Note II does indeed come with its defining feature, the S Pen. The display was built with Wacom technology, which allows for 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity (4 times what the original Note has), so this is definitely a stylus for content creation. I am not at all artistic, so my drawing exploits were limited to making a smiley face in S Note (which, admittedly, came out perfectly). I've used the S Pen for writing text messages and other text input, but I feel like the onscreen keyboard is still faster. As another aside, the S Pen is incompatible with the capacitive buttons on the Note II, so there are two shortcuts you have to use instead of pressing menu and back. You hold the S Pen's button and make a caret, ^ for menu and a less than symbol, < for back. It's a little annoying, but I guess it makes sense.
The Galaxy Note II comes with a RGB notification light in the front. It is not hard to miss when you have a notification, and I really like it. The DNA actually has two notification lights, one in the grille in the front and another to the left of the camera in the back. These can only glow green and amber, which is sad. Also, they are very hard to see and notice if you are not looking at them head-on, as they are recessed. Notification lights are one of the best things about Android in my mind, and I am very glad to see that both manufacturers included them.
The Droid DNA includes wireless charging capabilities, which Verizon decided to remove from the Note II (literally, they covered up the wireless charging contacts with plastic), which is definitely a win for the DNA. I wanted a phone with wireless charging, but I'll live. On the other hand, the DNA has a ridiculous microUSB port door that I just wanted to rip off. Supposedly it is to make the phone more water resistant, but I don't know if that's worthwhile when the tradeoff is so obnoxious.
The Verizon Galaxy Note II has a Verizon logo on the home button, unlike the Note II on every single other phone carrier. When I went into a Verizon store to ask if the screenshots on the preorder page that had the home button logo were true, the representative told me that I should be happy that they put the logo on the phone in so many places. Do you know why? It is because I wouldn't want my friends, or even random strangers, thinking that I had a phone on an "inferior" carrier like Sprint or AT&T. They should know that I have the great 4G LTE coverage that Verizon offers...ridiculous. Fortunately, after searching for "Verizon Note 2 home button cover," I found that someone was selling stickers to cover that inane logo. I haven't received mine yet, but hopefully it will not be too much of a hassle. Spigen is also selling a set of home button covers on Amazon, but I didn't think that they matched as well as the eBay ones.
Software Note II
After owning only the original Motorola Droid and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, I had never really experienced carrier skins, but I knew that when I was going to choose a phone that I would have to use either Samsung's Touchwiz or HTC's Sense. Both phones are running Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean, but to me it feels like Sense is stuck in the past of Froyo and Gingerbread *shudder*. Samsung's interface feels much more modern and updated, with most things being very well integrated from Jelly Bean into Touchwiz. On the other hand, Sense feels like it just slapped some new features from Jelly Bean on top of its old interface. Samsung exclusively uses the blue accents Android gained in Ice Cream Sandwich, while Sense has a horrible amalgamation of Sense green accents with a smattering of ICS blue ones. Additionally, features that I really love about Android, like getting to see the entire body of a text message as it goes through the status bar without having to pull down the notification tray, are completely missing in Sense. Why HTC, why?
Both phones have lock screen applications, which is definitely nice, but Sense gives you a built-in series of themes to choose from that lets you change both the lock screen as well as the color of all settings menus. This is nice, but half of them were pretty ugly, so I just stuck with one for the whole time. In addition, Verizon was nice enough to permanently install a good number of applications on both phones. Many of these can be disabled by going to Settings-->Application Manager and then clicking on the list of all applications to uninstall the ones you don't want, but some of them (like Verizon's visual voicemail client) are permanent.
I think that Android has always had more features than iOS but that iOS has always had more polish to it. After Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean, I no longer find this to be true. Jelly Bean looks fantastic, and it is also very feature-rich. iOS on the other hand has stagnated. I owned the original iPhone and the iPhone 4, and other than the increased resolution (and the ability to add home screen backgrounds), the software on both phones looks practically identical. iOS, although once groundbreaking, now looks positively gaudy, with many of its apps containing over-the-top skeumorphic design Game Center and Podcasts come to mind as particularly egregious examples. Android now offers a nice, clean interface that has finally caught up to iOS in terms of visual flair.
Jelly Bean isn't the massive overhaul that Ice Cream Sandwich was, but it definitely has some nice new features that I enjoy using. By long pressing on the home button and clicking on the Google icon, you can get to Google Now. Here, Google combines information that it already knows about you into sets of "cards" that appear throughout the day at (hopefully) the most helpful time. For instance, when I bought a case and screen protector for my Note II, there was a card that told me that my package had shipped with UPS two day shipping, and it gave me the option to track it or view the confirmation email from Amazon. Google Now also tells you the local weather for the next three days, traffic home from work and other frequently visited places, and sports scores for your favorite teams. In addition, by saying "Google" or pressing the speech button while in Google Now, you can use Google's enhanced voice actions. Here, Google uses its algorithms to answer questions about people and places. You can ask it math questions, set alarms, send texts, call people, and do a ton of other things. Somehow, Google has done something to make these voice searches incredibly quick and accurate, often much more so than Apple's voice assistant Siri. If you want to see a funny video of the two compared, search on YouTube for "Google Search vs. Siri App Judgment" and skip to 3:31 in the video, it really shows how well Google's voice recognition algorithm works. Another feature introduced in Jelly Bean is expandable/actionable notifications. When I get a text message, I can drag down with two fingers on the notification to expand it to see the entire message. This also works with emails and many other types of notifications, as long as the developer has enabled it.
Touchwiz has added a huge number of features to Jelly Bean. Here is a list of some of my favorites.
-Notification bar toggles: these are helpful if you want to turn Bluetooth on or change the screen brightness throughout the day without having to delve into system settings. Unfortunately, Verizon decided that it wanted to have a Wi-Fi notification as a separate ongoing notification instead of being built into the toggle.
-Call setting notification: when you're on a call, there is now a notification that allows you to turn on speakerphone, go to the dialer, or even end the call, which is extremely helpful.
-Smart stay: when you're looking at the phone, if the screen is about to turn off, it checks to see if your eyes are still on the screen or not. If they are, it does not turn the display off.
-Smart rotation: when you rotate the phone (like, if you decide to lay down), the phone checks to see if your head also rotated, or if you actually want the screen to change orientation.
-One handed operation: admittedly, this is a big phone. With one handed operation, you can choose to shrink the keyboard, dialer, calculator, or even unlock pattern to one side of the screen, which makes using the phone with one hand a lot more manageable.
-Blocking mode: this silences your phone at certain times during the day (for instance, if you want to sleep without waking up for calls or texts) with exceptions for certain people. Verizon decided that its customers did not need this feature, so they hid it, but it is easy to enable. Just Google "how to enable blocking mode on Verizon Note II" and there are plenty of tutorials showing how to get it back.
Of course, Touchwiz has some annoying points, but I have found that I don't really mind it too much so far. I prefer it by far to Sense, which felt like it was always treating me like a child.
Miscellaneous
The Galaxy Note II gets phenomenal battery life. On my Galaxy Nexus, I would be lucky to get 1.5-2 hours of screen on time, and I would always have to switch batteries by the afternoon. With the Droid DNA, I was getting around 3-3.5 hours of screen on time, which was enough for most days, but if I used it more than that, I was tethered to a charger. Yesterday, my Galaxy Note II was unplugged for 19 hours with nearly 6 hours of screen on time before it (and I) needed to be recharged. I just cannot believe how good the battery life is on the Note II, especially considering the size of its screen. You can buy extra batteries, but I'm not actually sure if I will, since my battery life has been so good.
The Note II has many accessories available for it, unlike the Droid DNA. This is probably because the DNA is exclusive to Verizon whereas the Note II is being sold worldwide and on all the carriers in the US. If you want to get official accessories (flip covers, media docks, etc.), you should be aware that if you register your Note II on Samsung's website that they actually give you a 50% off coupon on all the accessories on their website, which is a ridiculously good deal.
Due to its exterior, the Note II feels somewhat slippery, so I would recommend getting a slim fitting case at the very least. I got one from Amazon called the Ringke Slim and I love it. My S Pen hasn't scratched the screen (which is not surprising, considering that it is Gorilla Glass 2), but I decided to get a screen protector just in case. I'm not sure how necessary this was, but for such an expensive phone, it was worth it to protect my purchase.
I hope that in this 3000 word review of the Galaxy Note II I have been able to answer all of the questions you had about it. If you have any other questions that I can answer, feel free to leave a comment below. The Galaxy Note II is by far the best phone I have ever used, and I am positive that I made the correct decision in purchasing it over the Droid DNA.
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