On 25/10/2014 21:35, Tim Watts wrote:
On 25/10/14 21:11, Bob Eager wrote:

Kies was enough to decide me against another Samsung phone!


If you get an unbranded phone and don't think Google are Satan's love
child, you really do not need Kies at all IME.

File transfer is trivial via SFTP or USB direct.
Unbranded (ie not carrier branded) mean timely over the air Android
updates from Samsung (unlike Three who never release any updates to my
personal knowledge).

And Google means contact syncing solves that problem. I do not "back up"
to google though - don't trust them that far... But many of my more
fiddly apps have local backups and every 2 years I have a bot of a
manual file transfer process to the new device.

Very pleased with my Note 3 - decent battery life (by modern standards,
be hushed, ancient Nokia owners!) and lots of computing power

I'm still using the Note 1 and still find it really good.