Samsung Galaxy S sales surpass five million | Hacker News Reader

Samsung Galaxy S sales surpass five million

engadget.com

35 pointsGarbage14 comments

Got one. Nice hardware. Still waiting for the firmware update to fix GPS (completely shot) and WLAN (locks up frequently, requiring a reboot).

It has been promised for September. Now it's promised for October.

The eventual execution of this update will be the deciding factor over whether this has merely been my first samsung phone or also my last.

The otherwise splendid hard- and software can't mitigate the fact that the device has shipped with not one but two critical features being defective. That shouldn't happen in a flagship device like the Galaxy. And when it happens then it shouldn't take upwards of 3 months for a fix. Get your act together Samsung, quick.

I'm running JPK and it's much, much better.

Like you say - nice hardware but released with way too many bugs.

Turning off and on GPS i configuration helps. Yay like windows!

This GPS fix worked for me on the Vibrant: http://www.androidcentral.com/quick-fix-gps-issues-your-new-...

Sadly this exact fix seems to have caused my WLAN lockups.

After enabling it the GPS accuracy improved, but I noticed that my WLAN would be shot almost every morning (stuck in state "turning off...", could only be revived by rebooting).

After reverting the GPS settings to "standalone" a couple days ago I have not seen any more WLAN lockups.

My suspicion is that the fix causes the GPS subsystem to force-enable WLAN at regular intervals when it tries to pull updates from the internet server. This "force-enabling" seems to confuse the regular android/samsung WLAN manager and leaves it in a broken state as described above...

Either way, not an acceptable state of affairs for what is supposed to be a high-end smartphone.

It's not surprising that they've sold so many. The Galaxy S seems to be the first Android device that the maker hasn't gone the exclusive route. In the US, yes, they did rename it and make minute changes for different carriers, but its substantially the same phone released at mostly the same time.

It's about time that my choice in phone didn't dictate the carrier I'm tied to. Samsung gives me that choice in a way that Motorola makes me tied to Verizon, Apple makes me tied to AT&T and HTC ties me to a various carrier depending on which model of their's I want.

I was really hoping he Galaxy S line would succeed even if just to prove that you can have a non-exclusive phone that's a big seller.

The real villain there is the balkanized (and, quite frankly, medieval) nature of US cellular infrastructure.

If you want 3G in the US, then your choice of phone ties you to a carrier. I own a Vibrant (off contract) and although I can use it with any carrier when in Europe, I couldn't leave T-mobile because the 3G radio won't work with other US carriers. (I'm happy with T-mo, but that's not the point.)

I have an unlocked Vibrant, and it works well on AT&T's 3G network. Generally it's AT&T phones that don't work well with others, since they actually disable non-AT&T frequency bands.

Interesting, all the specs I've seen say it only supports UMTS Band I (2100, Europe) and IV (1700 "AWS", US T-mobile). You'd think they would have mentioned that it also supports band II (1900, AT&T). I just ran a fresh search and came up with this page which supports your claim, but it's absurd not to list it anywhere else: http://ars.samsung.com/customer/usa/jsp/faqs/faqs_view_us.js...

Only Sprint has the keyboard version of the Galaxy S, which is a major change.

Got one (broke my contract with AT&T/iPhone3GS). Baked the Fascinate off against the Droid Incredible and the D2. The Galaxy/Fascinate's UI's response is iPhone-smooth. All of the other phones had little interaction lags even though they were running 2.2. It turns out that smoothness is a real concern for me (probably because I think it indicates something about full-stack performance), so I grabbed the Fascinate.

I was comparing my Fascinate to a friend's iPhone4 the other day and ... there wasn't much of a comparison... Build quality and screen on the iPhone4 are better; everything else is better on the Fascinate. I was kinda shocked that, after a short time using a fast Android phone, I couldn't conceive of wanting an iPhone; it seemed limited in its conception/functionality.

Definitely some hiccups with the phone, but I was all set to root it, delete BlockBuster, switch to LauncherPro, blah, blah, blah, and I'm not sure that I'll do any of that. Was concerned about the delay in getting 2.2; now, not so much. I'm not a huge GPS user, so haven't been bugged by the GPS issue.

The phone is pretty excellent (I have not been victim of any GPS/other problems) though the pushed-back 2.2 update is a bit annoying.

The only real annoyance I have had is with Samsung Kies (the company's firmware update- and externalised crapware-management application), which is just about the worst desktop app I have ever had to try use. I say try because it never works.

Of course, the solution is easy if it fails to update 2.2 - will just install it "unofficially" and probably not look back.

I've got one, it cost me a penny (plus a two year contract to T-Mobile, which I would have got anyway).

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