more on battery life

a few more comments.

the infamous "media server" bug that is discussed on the internet seems to be caused by the media server indexing large numbers of files on the SD card, and consuming lots of battery. the two solutions seem to be to let it run its course (altho i believe it will repeat the indexing on every USB disconnect), or eliminate the cause of huge #s of files on your SD card. some are blaming backup programs for creating huge #s of files.

the changes that made the biggest difference for me were: turning down the display brightness, and setting "Wifi on during sleep" to ALWAYS.

success for me is a battery that doesn't die before bedtime - a nearly 18 hour timespan from 7am to 11pm.  i thought i'd have to disable 4G to achieve this. but there is no way to disable it on Verizon phones, that I have found so far.  before you send me email, go look - Verizon eliminated this setting from the settings page in the S3. you can't deselect LTE.  you must select Global, LTE/CDMA, or GSM. there must be some 3rd party app that can turn off LTE?!

at this point i seem to be getting 12-15 hours with light usage; that is probably a little better than i got with the Galaxy Note. the Note was SO bogged down by all the (mostly useless) apps i'd loaded. it really needed to be wiped clean and restored with only the apps i really needed.

why did i switch from the Note to the S3? i liked the Note a lot. but i was tired of having people gasp in disbelief when i took my "huuuge" phone out. and it WAS kinda crazy to hold up that huuuge phone to my ear to answer a phonecall. the stylus was very cool technology but i didn't find the stylus-enabled apps that compelling.  S-Note was a good idea but the app did not sync with the cloud. you had to email each page of each note to yourself and then attach it to OneNote, or Evernote.  really tedious when you can generate 5-7 pages of notes in a meeting. and the pages don't number themselves so you have to manually sequence them back together.  i just never found time to do this. i was sort of shocked that samsung had not considered the workflow of syncing SNote data to the cloud.  i have wasted too much time using proprietary software on smartphones that locked the data away inside itself with no easy way to export it (looking at you, HP 100LX notetaker, and Palm Pilot).  I had a file full of my detailed medical history and due to incompatible file formats it got lost during a data sync from phone to phone. now it's completely gone. And just becuase there is "a way" to export data doesn't mean that its a convenient way.  it should automatically sync by itself to your preferred cloud.  for me, it was OneNote for work and Evernote for personal.  we can all agree that multiple cloud archives is unmanageable, right?

 the Note's stylus performance was superb and it was really fun to draw with. i read that the new stylus has new button placement and a flexible tip for more realistic writing action, 1024 levels of pressure detection, and S-Note starts automatically when you take the stylus out.  if you are an artist i highly recommend checking out the Note's stylus.

long story short (TL; DR), i wasn't dying to get the Note II; I got the S3 instead, and I don't miss the stylus at all.