A non-premature-ejaculatory look at the Samsung Galaxy S

For those of you who don’t want to read the full story… If you have a Samsung Galaxy S and you are really disappointed with:

• Exchange mail push notifications not working at times and sluggish speeds of the app
• Sluggish performance in general
• Terrible battery life

Upgrade the firmware to 2.2 Froyo. This is available via Samsung Kies now for all Australian providers of the Samsung Galaxy S. Install it on your PC and upgrade!!! To check what firmware you have currently go to Settings -> About Phone and you should see firmware version.

Now for the full story:

So I’ve had the Samsung Galaxy S for about 6 months now and as much as I wanted to write an early raving review about it, I knew it wouldn’t be doing the device any justice because of how immensely shithouse (for lack of a better description) I found it compared to everyone else who bought it did. I was coming from using an iPhone 3G for a year which I had no problems with until OS 4 came out. I think this made a difference in my perception of the Samsung.

Call me a conspiracy theorist but Apple’s device building quality = 10. Apple’s marketing ploys and tactics = 10. As soon as the new iPhone 3Gs/4 came out, the quality of user experience was lost on the iPhone 3G….A bit too much of a push from Apple for me to upgrade in my opinion. I wanted to sue Steve Jobs for ruining my product but then I realised you can never really own an Apple product. They more or less own you. The only way to get out of Apples product prison was to buy something that did what my iPhone did, with none of the handcuffs. So I switched to the Samsung Galaxy S.

Firstly I was running on Android 1.2. They have cute little names for Android builds like gingerbread, froyo etc. Don’t let the names fool you. Anything under 2.0 is absolute shit. They should rename them to Android 1.1 – Embryo, Android 1.2 – Autism, Android 1.8 – Parkinsons. Anyway I guess I should talk about the phone:

First Impressions (keep in mind this was running 1.2)

At first I thought, wow this is a bit longer than I thought it would be. It has a 4.0” display which is considerably larger than the iPhones so obviously the phone is a little bit longer as well. It manages to be convenient though as it is lighter than the iPhone and the display is gorrrgeeousss (imagine a gay man saying this). It was rich in colour and I was really happy with how great video and photos came out. After all it was boasting a 5mp camera and 720p shooting just like the iPhone 4.

During the first day of use I didn’t notice the lag you get at literally random times but what I did notice was the battery diminishes incredibly quickly. I didn’t think about it too much as I was playing with it a lot but later on I still had the issue. Also for those of you who sleep near your phone like I do, there is a sound the phone makes to notify you that the battery is fully charged….yeah… you can’t turn that off (I don’t think) and it goes off at about 3am daily. I’m used to it now so not a huge deal breaker personally.

Terrible things about the phone running 1.2

• Firstly I responded late to a few important emails due to auto-push notifications not actually meaning push in Android 1.gaytard.2. The exchange compatibility was appalling! I would have to keep manually resetting the connection to the mail server to get mail. Push would work for a little while and then stop. This worked pretty much flawlessly on the iPhone from the start.
• Battery life was pretty bad. I would unplug it from the charger at about 8am and it would be dead by 8pm after receiving maybe 3 SMS and 1 phone call on average.
• The number one for me is the lag. At times the phone would be quick and very responsive,  but in the middle of doing something like checking an email, the phone would just stop responding. You’d click on the button to return to home screen and nothing would happen, about 1 minute later the phone would make a couple of vibrating bumps and then you would have to force close the app. Sometimes it would be so bad I’d have to turn the phone off completely to bring it to working order again. Out of 10, I’d give myself a 2 for patience. The worst scenario I had was when I was in a cab trying to check an email for an address. The phone stopped responding while checking the mail and we missed the turn where I had to go. Then!!! I had to make a call to let me into a data centre as it was an emergency and I accidentally hit the maps button. That sent the phone into complete retard mode and I had to turn it off and on again. A highly stressful situation made 10x worse thanks to this phone.
• There were no officially provided updates for the phone on Virgin until very recently. This is crazy. I’ve had the phone for so many months and it was running like a drunk $2 hooker in heels would when she skimps out on her pimp. So many people have been complaining and Google had released 2.2 about 5 months ago if not longer so why did we have to wait so long since release date? Shame on you! Shame on all of you!

Tips that got the phone to be usable:

I got so sick of the Samsung that I switched back to the iPhone for about a month. When I got back from holiday I decided to plug the phone into the computer and finally there was an update ready to be installed. The update ran smoothly and I noticed the phone ran smoothly after the update too! It’s not completely 100% lag-free but lag-free enough for me to categorise it as a little better than usable. Here are further things I did to get the phone working a bit better after the update:

• For battery life I installed an app from the android market called Juice Defender. This app controls things things like data transfer, 3G, screen brightness and allows you to schedule when you need data on and things like that. I have found it to increase battery life substantially. I can now use the phone for a full day easily. Sometimes even overnight and throughout the next morning with average use. The less I use the phone the more drastic Juice defender helps to keep the phone going.
• I noticed that push notifications were working a lot better but the email app that comes native to Android ran slower than it did before. I then noticed that there is an email app in the Samsung set of apps as well and decided to try it out. This app is great! It updates the inbox straight away and it’s quick to retrieve emails to read. The only issue is that you can’t select multiple emails and mark them as read or delete them. This is not a major issue for me though as I want to read every single email that comes into my inbox for the day. The app is called Samsung email. Be sure to get rid of your exchange account from the native app first though.
• A cool way of sharing apps with friends is to set up a dropbox account and share it with your friends. This way you can get the dropbox app for android and access this shared folder between each other. At the moment I am doing this with a friend of mine who fills up this folder with all the cool apps he finds. I then go through the list and download any new ones he has put in there. It saves me from having to hunt down these apps myself
• There are apps which are known as lag fixes and these are apparently effective against the lag issues on the Samsung Galaxy S. I say apparently because I don’t use it as you have to root the phone to do so

Conclusion:

The Samsung Galaxy S has great potential. Its hardware specifications are out there with the best handset devices out to date, but the letdown of this product is its reliance on the relatively young and generic OS Android. I compare the Samsung with the iPhone but this isn’t a fair comparison because Apple only need to product test a small set of devices for their OS. The Samsung is using a pre-built OS and modifying it to fit the functionality of the phone. Naturally, getting the balance of OS and hardware correct will take some time and I think once they get it right, the phone will exceed the iPhone. I bet you Apple fan boys will say… Yeah but the Apple iPhone 4 just works and by the time Samsung get it right there’ll be a new iPhone. Well that’s fine because there will also be a new Samsung and ever-advancing updates to Android…. Plus Steve Jobs is going to die soon and once that happens Apple might start making umbrellas and kitchen appliances so go to hell you arseholes. Also I have an iMac and was gifted an iPad. I hate myself as much as I hate you Apple fan boys.