Gorgeous 5.5." Super Amoled display, 720p display looks very crisp and sharp.
S-Pen: This alone makes it a phone worth the money - Samsung gives feature rich software to unleash the capabilities of S-pen. The S-pen works flawlessly, its almost like working with paper on a page, but better.
2.1 Galaxy Sketch: This piece of software from Autodesk works so nicely with S-Pen, you have all the pencils, brushes, sprays, tools at your disposal. Multilayers to work with and it all comes free with your phone. Just Brilliant!
2.2 Action Memo: Great feature to note anything on the fly.
2.3 Scrapbooker: Extremely handy if you like saving something you like on a webpage, you can also include your own handwritten notes along with it. Awesome.!
Hexacore processor+ Mali GPU: Deliver superb performance, No stutters lags whatsover, Playing games is wonderful experience on this phone. Watching any multimedia content makes you immerse into the screen and you forget that you are watching on your mobile.
Touchwiz: There are many skeptics who feel that touchwiz is bloated with unnecessary apps, but trust me I have used stock android and a million other roms on my Galaxy S 2. Touchwiz offers superb functionality, with minimal memory usage and great battery life. I found the interface very neat and beautiful. I especially love the lockscreen. The colours are just amazing.
Battery Life: The battery-life on this phone is just through the roof. Currently you will not find this kind of battery performance with any other phone, not even note 3. Note 3 has 100 mah extra but it has a more power hungry processor and a higher resolution screen. It last a day of heavy usage with plenty to spare.
Reading/Net Surfing: Gsmarena has declared this the fastest phone ever when it comes to rendering web pages. I could test this out, as we already have limited internet speed. However, reading on this gorgeous display is a treat. Specially with the chrome browser, you get the whole screen and it gives a very comfortable reading experience.
Camera: The 8 megapixel camera on this phone offers incredible detail and is easily the best in its class. Heck, it even challenges cameras in 13 MP range. The camera app is fully featured and offers tons of functionality. Even low light performance is respectable.(Samsung has worked on this, their cameras usually have poor low light performance).
Kitkat Update: The update is in works and will roll out soon.
What does it lack?
The only thing that I would have liked this phone to have is Gorilla Glass. But you can always use scratch guards. Heck, I have even seen people use scratch guards on Gorilla Glass. So, if your are one of them, this shouldn’t bother you.
The community support on xda developers is very limited as this phone was launched at a price which was very close to Note 3, so very few people bought it. But, I am glad that Samsung dropped the price and it is a steal in this price range.
Accessories: for this phone are quite limited, but you can find the essentials like S-view cover, Ncase bumper, and screen guard. So, this was not an issue for me.
PS > Please don’t pay much attention to the reviews of people who are neither certified buyers, nor have purchased the phone from anywhere else. They just come and give pathetic rating without having any knowledge about the phone.