As the owner and editor of a tech blog I always like to own phones from different operating systems to try and maintain some neutral bias.

I was out shopping and was playing with the Note 3. I quite like this device but its originally sim free price was way too expensive. It has now seen this price drop by £200 so the option of owning one becomes more of a reality.

Whilst I was using the store demo model, instead of the shop assistant I was greeted by the actual Samsung representative who was visiting the store. We had a great exchange over the Note 3, but I did ask some questions which he did not really have a suitable answer or solution.

You see if you own an Apple iPhone or iPad you can backup your device to your PC or Apple’s iCloud. If ever you need to wipe and restore, or you get a new iPhone or iPad you can restore from your backup as easy as ABC. Everything comes back! This is an awesome feature and I have used it loads of time, always successfully.

But with the Note 3, everything becomes more complicated. Do you backup to Google? or to Samsung servers or both? What gets backed up? Everything? Or just pieces? What if your Note 3 phone got stolen or was faulty and you got a replacement? Can you restore it from your old Note 3? The answer is not completely.

What amazed me even more was the Note 3 stylus “Action Notes” which is one of the options that appears when you pull the stylus out of the device CANNOT be backed up anywhere. The Samsung representative even looked through the file manager, saying if you could find where they were stored, you could manually select and copy the Action Notes in to the cloud. Except he could not find them in the file manager either.

So one of the key Note 3 apps has no backup solution as a default. Am I missing something here because this cannot be right, surely?