[Nexus One General] leoni1980:
GALAXY S AND N1 OWNER'S opinion

I had an original Galaxy last year and upon seeing this demoed I poured scorn on it, saying I would never touch another Samsung....but I got swayed by the spec!

Got the Galaxy S on upgrade on Friday and here's my opinion so far:

First impression of screen is that its clarity surpasses the N1. The screen build seems TIGHTER and you don't get the feeling that there is a glass pane above an OLED panel. Testing mutitouch with a few Market apps saw the N1 lose trackpoints (as expected) while the Samsung's SAMOLED followed both fingers in every angle without fail. General feel of screen is more responsive and there are no strange screen glitches.

Build quality of Galaxy S is not as bad as people make out: the high grade plastic seems very resilient - I dropped it on my wooden floor shiny-back-downwards and close scrutiny under bright light showed no scuffs whatsoever (something that certainly could not be said for the iPhone 3Gs!). Certainly the Nexus feels more compact and premium but the Samsung DEFINITELY does not feel cheap in my opinion.

UI is not hugely important to me as some as I just use Launcher Pro anyway, but I definitely prefer stock to Touchwiz. I don't like any of the TouchWiz widgets and it looks like crap in my opinion. As I said though I use Launcher Pro and it works beautifully on the SGS.

Extra 8GB of memory is nice to have on the Samsung as no doubt its read/write speed is faster than a cheap SDHC. The 2GB of ROM also means i will probably not need to worry about A2SD as I don't play games.

Speed of SGS is on a par with N!, although the occasional black screen is evident. Considering that this is running 2.1 I can't wait to see its Froyo benchmarks: the SGS has a noticeably zippier processor, but this shines most in the browser and when launching movies. I've thrown every file I've got at it and been able to play it smooth and lag free on either the built in player or Rockplayer. I tried a few WMV files and HD clips through Rockplayer on both devices and in all cases the N1 ran at a low framerate while the SGS buzzed along. I downloaded some 720p clips with TubeDownloader straight to both the N1 and the SGS: the N1 wouldn't even launch them with Rockplayer while the Samsung (with Rockplayer AND default video player) played them as smooth as silk, with rich sound dynamics and perfect sync.

Signal strength seems better on the SGS: in places where I regularly suffer dropped data connections and only 1-2 bars the SGS has at least three bars and hasn't failed with a data connection yet. We all know that signal bars don't necessarily mean much (eh Mr Jobs?) but certainly for me the signs are positive. Call clarity is just as good even without noise cancellation. Another problem I have with the N1 is with SMS REGULARLY failing to send (I send 4000+ a month), whether the radio is set to WCDMA ONLY or WDCMA PREFERRED. The Samsung Galaxy S has only failed one message so far and it immediately re-sent without me having to switch airplane mode off and on again.

LOUDSPEAKER to me is critical as I listen to a lot of podcasts. Going from the 3Gs to the N1 is something of a shock as the loudspeaker is so tinny and awful, however I'd kind of gotten used to it. Happily the loudspeaker on the Samsung is really excellent, with much better dynamics...and it's louder. On the music front the addition of music controls in the notifications bar is very handy, and it's good to have an EQ. One downside was that I couldn't use my iPhone mic earbuds with the Samsung...not sure why.

Camera on SGS is in my opinion a little sharper than the N1 although there's not much in it from what I've looked at on my laptop. I suspect Samsung use better optics than HTC though. Video capture is a different story: it's so sharp and beautiful. Resultant files are VERY big though: a thirty second video of my dog weighed in at around 55mb (here's the version I uploaded to YouTube. Sadly YouTube shrunk it down to only 9mb and it is nowhere near as smooth and sharp but it gives you an idea..). The lack of flash IS a letdown but aperture of Samsung lens seems wide enough for most conditions.

Text input is great on the SGS as the screen seems to have a level of responsiveness akin to an iPhone. It's hard to put into words but it has a snappier FEEL to it. I do prefer the Froyo keyboard to anything though.

I'm just getting used to the Samsung keyboard and it does have some nice features. Out of the box T9 is off for some reason but once turned on it not only predicts words well but offers a next word prediction algorithm (this CAN be switched off) which attempts to guess your next word in a sentence by learning your grammatical peculiarities. It's great for firing off a quick and oft-used sentence but takes some getting used to. If you HOLD the numeric key you get a D-PAD with cut copy and paste feature - pretty handy.

Battery life seems on a par, despite the bigger screen, which surprised me; although I've not given the SGS a proper test of battery resilience yet. I also have a spare battery and cradle for my N1 so it is unlikely to ever see me phoneless in an emergency. I can't afford to fork out for a spare SGS battery just yet unless I see one cheap.

That's about all I can think of for now...if anyone has any more questions or wants me to compare anything let me know.