[Fascinate General] KitsuneKnight:
My old Samsung dumb-phone was wonderful. I took crap care of it, and it took a beating (I'd frequently toss it), I'd never give a single concern for maintaining the battery, it got great signal pretty much everywhere (when I went to the woods with a bunch of people, the people on AT&T would have a paper weight, the other people on Verizon would have occasional signal, and I'd have consistent, albeit poor, signal), and I'd easily go a week on a charge.

Occasionally I'd get hit by a software bug, like once ever several months, but over the several years I had the phone (5+ I think?), those were quite few in number.

My Fascinate, on the other hand, other than the screen the hardware seems moderate at best. The processor/GPU don't matter a lot long as they're at least as good as what 'most people' have, since generally programs are designed to be used on the more common phones. Now the GPU could have been leveraged on Gingerbread, but, we don't really have Gingerbread, although people like PK are working on it.

There's also 'only' 384 MBs of usable RAM in the phone, meaning less apps can be kept asleep in the background, causing apps to have to save their state & be restarted more often (IIRC, all the other Galaxy S phones have 512 usable!).

Then there's the GPS. It was flat out broken when Samsung released this phone, and I still have a horrible GPS- the other day it took ~25 minutes for the GPS to lock (even after downloading AGPS data, and getting the no help that cellular triangulation and wifi location services provides), just in time for us to miss the turn to our destination! (resulting in everyone agreeing that my phone "sucked").

No notification LED... we've had to work around that with 'No LED' and BLN- hardly ideal solutions... more like clever hacks. 802.11N also doesn't support the 5Ghz band, apparently... lovely. The battery life is also nothing to write home about. And there's quite a number of other shortcomings with this phone's hardware.

Is the Fascinate's hardware horrible? No, with the exception of the screen (which is quite good), most of it's around par, some above, some below. But the Fascinate's problem is it's crippled by horrible software! Our Devs will fix that, you say? So how's that CM7 working for you? MIUI? AOSP? Your options, at this point, are either use a hacked up Samsung ROM, or lose various

hardware

support. Is it because our devs suck? Hell no, they've long since shown they're damn good at what they do- but even so they can only do so much at a time. Take the best hardware in the world, but put **** software on it, and you've got ****. Bad software will ruin any hardware.

Good software on bad hardware, though, can at least make the hardware bearable. Next time, I'm picking my phone based off which actually has a fully custom ROMs ported to it, like MIUI or CyanogenMod- that should be a good indicator of how good the software support should be- then I'll go by hardware.

Edit: New post while I was writing... Does "obtaining a new device" mean, "trade in for a phone with Froyo"? If so... that's quite surprising, and it'd be interesting exactly what phones are available for that. Although, at this point, I just feel like taking it until my renewal comes around- all the phones are going to be far superior by then, and, with any luck, this sort of BS will have been reined in by Google.