[Galaxy S II Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] alsheron:
Ok, I've read all of the replies so far and they're very interesting. Even though I'm not going to stop people getting the wrong end of the stick or enable them to think things through properly - I want to clear a few things up:

1. I am not trolling to whoever said that. Just a silly accusation. I've been very honest about my experiences and there's no reason to assume anything else. I do wonder who IS trolling?

2. This IS, absolutely, positively a Samsung Galaxy S II (2).

3. I have only had the phone for ONE day.

4. I have tested the phone OUTSIDE, away from tall buildings and ALONGSIDE a HTC Hero. I did the testing with GPS Status & Toolbox, GPS Test and Google Maps and monitored the ACCURACY reading on BOTH devices *AT THE SAME TIME*

This is the important bit:

5. The accuracy on the HTC Hero was consistently excellent AND stable i.e. it stayed the same. In Google Maps the blue circle vanished (as accurate as it gets on these devices) and it stayed that way. At exactly the same time, the blue circle on the SGSII stayed quite large (larger than the width of a UK road and larger than the length of at least 4 cars - if not more). The SGSII blue circle kept fluctuating - getting a bit smaller and then getting a bit bigger and a couple of times losing me completely and the blue arrow appeared somewhere about 10 miles away.

The issue here is NOT that I, or anyone else is expecting "perfect" accuracy from my SGSII. I do have an external bluetooth GPS receiver that I could use to get pretty much that kind of accuracy and I used that with my original SGS.

The point here is that these phones are marketed and sold as devices that are able to perform various types of navigation and GPS based utilities. Driving navigation in particular requires a solid, high level of accuracy. The Galaxy S II, from my *limited* experiences so far (this is my second handset) has consistently been significantly worse than my 3 year old HTC Hero. So much so that at the moment - it's unuseable for Google Navigation.

OF COURSE there are variances between phones - but this is Samsung's flagship smartphone and with the issues in its predecessor, it's unbelievable that ANY of the SGSII's would have the issues that were so prevalent in the original SGS. Well - I suppose maybe some - but i've now had 2 and the odds of this being isolated are getting slimmer.

Some people replying here either don't need their GPS to be very accurate or simply don't understand what it means. Yes, maybe my accuracy goes down to 26m or thereabouts - but when it fluctuates frequently and goes up to 60-80m and back and down and up etc - it's NOT USEABLE for anthing other than crude "what's near me" features.

Samsung apparently changed the chipset in this phone that controls GPS. I do think this could be down to a software problem because as I said - The SGSII is getting a similar number of locks as my HTC Hero - it's just not translating that into accuracy.

Oh, and did I mention that turining OFF wifi was known to help the original SGS perform better with the GPS? If that's still the case with the SGSII - it's simply unnacceptable. As far as I know - WIFI and GPS are controlled by the same chip? Turning off WIFI would then clearly have the potential to improve the GPS accuracy/performance.

After all that - YES - this is a small sample of phones we're talking about. I'm taking mine back to O2 to swap out this morning and will report back.

Really need people to understand accuracy here and stop confusing it with bleedin' lock times. Aaaaarrrgh!

ALSO: Please test with WIFI ON. Why should we need to/have to turn it off??!! Most people "out there" would have it on when using GPS anyway - so it's a more realistic test to keep it ON.

Thanks!