How to speed up the Galaxy Note 2

The popular 2012 phablet by Samsung, the Galaxy Note 2, has been receiving critical praise since its conception and users are still enjoying the larger screen, great productivity features and S Pen stylus that it has to offer.

On the other hand though, the Galaxy Note 2’s hardware doesn’t compare to that of recent smartphones and you may find that it is just a little too slow, despite having been recently updated to Android 4.4.2 KitKat in some regions. Today we’ll outline a few tips and tricks that should help you speed up not only the performance of your Note 2, but also give you some pointers on how to use it more effectively.

Turn off S Voice, it sucks

'Scuse my language. A rudimentary step would be to disable S Voice. S Voice will turn on when you double tap on the home button, this being the default setting. However this is just another one of the built-in features of Samsung devices that you can’t uninstall unless you root your phone. Samsung, however, was nice enough to allow you to turn off the feature where you double tap to access it.

• To be able to do this, double tap the home button and press the menu button to get to settings.
• Uncheck the box that says ''Open via home key''. If you do this, tapping on the home button will just bring you to the home screen.

You can do two things to get rid of S Voice: either uncheck it in the settings, or completely get rid of it in the Application Manager.

The reason why you want to do this is not only because S Voice is quite unreliable, despite some recent improvements, but also because your system will wait a fraction of a second for that second tap before actually bringing you to the home screen, which slows your Note 2 down a little bit. You can also uninstall the updates and turn it off completely in the settings of your phone, just like many other pre-installed bloatware features of the Note 2.

Turn off animations and get down to business faster

A snappier Note 2 can also be achieved by turning off the animations for window transition, animator duration and transition animations. This just means that you’ll be getting rid of the effects when switching between apps, heading back to the home screen from an app or menu, lock screen effects and any animation in general. This can easily be done right in the settings of your Note 2.

• First you have to ensure that the developer options are enabled. To do this, tap the build number in the ‘about device’ section of your settings. You will see a message pop up saying ‘‘Developer mode has been turned on’’.
• From there, go back to Developer options, scroll down to Window animation, scale, transition animation scale and animator duration scale and change all of these to off.

Get rid of fluffly animations, and get to what you really want to do faster

Ditch Bluetooth and use Wi-Fi Direct instead

Transferring files, images and any data to another Samsung device can be done many ways: Bluetooth, emailing, S Beam etc. However, there is another way to do it, called Wi-Fi Direct. This is much faster than sharing via Bluetooth, and you don’t actually need to have an internet connection to use it.

• All you do is head to the Wi-Fi settings of your device, and then select Wi-Fi Direct from the bottom of the list of possible Wi-Fi networks. There, hit scan to see the list of devices nearby to connect with. Select the one you want.
• After the connection is established, you can simply find the document, file, or picture you would like to send and hit the share icon. This will give you the option of Wi-Fi Direct, where you then choose the connected device you would like to send it to.

Try Wi-Fi Direct to send files from one device to another. 

Get root access for the Note 2 to have almighty powers

Smartphones users are really limited by what they can do with their device when they don’t have root access. Rooting your device will open the floodgates to being able to do much more. For example, you can install a custom ROM, you can get rid of bloatware for good, you can overclock the Note 2 kernel to run at 1.8 GHz instead of 1.6 GHz and much more! Check out our root tutorial for the Galaxy Note 2.

Rooting your smarpthone opens up a whole new world of things to do with your device, as well as ways to make it go faster. 

Get rid of the 'Wiz and bring in a launcher

The thing about TouchWiz is that it is just so full of features, animations, bells and whistles that this in itself is the cause for a slow Galaxy Note 2, so what do you do? Cover it up with a third-party launcher! There are so many good ones in the Google Play Store, which offer a lot more efficient features and usability, like Nova, Apex and Go Launcher.

You don't need to be stuck with TouchWiz, thanks to the great launchers on the Play Store. 

Get a sidebar full of app access on the fly

Glovebox is another app that will help you be super fast in transitioning between apps. It offers you a customizable bar which can pop out of the screen when using any device, as well as the home screen. The Note 2 is already great at customization but this is just another cool one to make your phablet usage just a bit more effective.

Glovebox - Side launcherINSTALL

You can customize Glovebox to have all the apps you want. These are available at any point in time, when using any application.