I played with a N12 at BB and came away with a different opinion. Most of the differences between it and the N10.1-14 were pretty minor and aesthetic. M-UX is of course new but did you look at the number and type of widgets available? Pretty sparse. What used to be My Magazine is now broken up so each category in what was the "News" section are now individual widgets. There's no Facebook for the Social widget either just like My Magazine. There's e-mail, calendar, and all the S Apps like Hub, Apps, WatchOn etc. There's Hancom widgets but we're probably not getting it (unless you side load it as explained in the apps section of the forum). Not much else. And at CES there were mini tiles shown that acted like shortcuts to a bunch of common/popular apps; gone. Unless Samsung's got big future plans for stocking M-UX with widgets and shortcuts I'd be fine without having a mandatory page of it on my home screen.
In terms of TW (now "classic") the settings menus and some others have been freshened and the notification panel drop down has been reformatted/resized so it's more appropriate for a tablet. There are more Pen Window apps and the way you launch multitasking's been revised to "swipe from the side" which now conflicts with other apps (EG: Astro) that also swipe from the side. You can now also cascade (overlay) Multi View windows which was a N10.1-12 feature that got left out of the N10.1-14 launch ROM.
What other major changes or differences did you notice that I missed?
As for Samsung's interpretation of 4.4 over 4.3 I've been using an "official" AT&T 4.4 ROM for about a month on my N3. The only functional changes are the location and wireless control panels have been re-worked so they are much clearer and easier to interpret and the lock screen has a "one app" option that's set to camera by default but can be changed to any app. It can also be set to "4.3 style" which I chose because there are more options including launching five apps from the lock screen. The notification bar icons are white (wow!
), there's a new slightly revised default system font, and there are some minor UI graphic changes. You have to look pretty hard to see the differences between 4.3 and 4.4 as designed by Samsung. The biggest difference I've seen is my battery life went up and the N3 which was already fluid on 4.3 became more so. Having played with M-UX and come away meh, performance improvements are what I'm looking forward to most in our update. That along with some of the cleaned up menus and new Multi View functionality.
