yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Galaxy S I9000 General] riz157:
Galaxys S is a good device but could be a the best device in the market at the moment if the gps issue and lag issue can be resolved, to be honest laggng has pretty much dissappeared with the newer firmware (JM5). GPs is working better but not quite as good as the desire.

I also owned the desire and sold it for sammy gs, regretted it intially but since how grown to appreciate the sgs. The screen resolution, sharp and smooth graphics, bigger screen and better video playback and not forgetting the 16gb internal memory. I do miss some of the desire features like flash, htc widgets, htc internet browser and most of all the rom choices but overall I couldn't go back to desire as the sgs is far superior device. The pro's out weigh the con's in my opinion.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Case_:
Despite the GPS acting out sometimes (well, more often than not), I'd definitely recommend Galaxy S to anyone (while mentioning the things I think could make Galaxy S better, like including a notification LED or trackball). I've seen and worked with my share of Android phones in the past year and yet I'm pretty amazed by this phone and don't regret buying it at all (which, if you knew me, is telling something, since I usually regret buying almost anything ;) )

Then again, Nexus has the greatest community support and always will have, yes.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] darkoroje:
It is a good phone with an excellent screen, which is its best feature. The hardware is good, unfortunately the software leaves a lot to be desired:

* Considerable lag when starting applications. This can be made better using various fixes posted on this forum, however none of the suggestions are a permanent solution and Samsung has yet to comment on this.

* The GPS is, in my experience, completely unreliable. I have yet to get a good lock while driving, and most of the time while driving I get no lock at all.

* Every time USB is connected in mass storage mode and then disconnected it runs the media scanner. With stock firmware that makes the phone unusable for a minute or two.

I still like the phone however it requires a lot of tweaking to get it to work properly, and the GPS may or may not be fixed, depending on whether it is a software or hardware problem.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Case_:
The lag is gone for me in JM5 firmware (as I've already said in some other thread).
[Galaxy S I9000 General] freshko:
New softwares have heavily improved lag problems. Also I am using GPS quite often (navigon) and there are no any problems. I totally recommend the purchase, especially because of the fancy look.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] jonidroid:
I recommend SGS , really. Only bad thing in this phone is touchwiz , i dont like it at all. Stock android would be better :)
[Galaxy S I9000 General] AllGamer:
you can remove the touchwiz (which i don't like either) and then install Launcher Pro, or HTC Sense
[Galaxy S I9000 General] cyberz:
Hi,

I have the Galaxy S and iphone 3Gs.

Sincerely, have no problem with gps on Galaxy S. Sure the problems with gps are real, but I not detected them, for now.

With iphone's GPS, lost the signal and the initial fix employ a long, very long time; frequently it is not accurate, because lost the signal.

With Galaxy S, fix after little seconds, and not lost the signal. And, the Galaxy S fix the signal inside my home, iphone 3Gs not!

Remember, the Galaxy S is a phone. If anyone want a perfect GPS, is better buy a dedicate GPS or dedicate antenna, like my "old" Globalsat antenna.

Regards and Excuse me for my bad English

p.s. What mean "Desire have better B.Q."??
[Galaxy S I9000 General] AllGamer:
very good point

i too compare the GPS performance with my HTC Athena GPS performance (which is waaaaaaaaaay worse)

Blackberry have the best GPS
[Galaxy S I9000 General] darkoroje:
Yes, there are better firmware versions, as well as EXT3 hack or moving data to dbdata. However there is no official firmware release from Samsung that addresses the lag.

I had a Nexus One prior to Galaxy S. Nexus One did not have these problems, the lag is significantly worse on the Galaxy.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Case_:
Well now...let's not get ahead of ourselves...;)
[Galaxy S I9000 General] elmicha:
This 8 GB internal memory sounds really nice. Is it possible to install apps there? What about the partition for the cache/dalvik-cache, is it big enough? Or better worded: how is this internal memory partitioned?
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Roy Ngan:
yes, will still recommend sgs
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Case_:
You've got 2GB for /data partition - that means apps, dalvik-cache and user settings. So where Desire and Nexus have around 160MB max, Galaxy S has 2GB ;)

The remaining 6GB is used as a regular SD card and it's even mounted at /sdcard (the optional external SD is then mounted at /sdcard/sd). But I guess it wouldn't be too difficult to make a custom firmware where the partitioning scheme of those 8GB was partitioned differently, perhaps even making the whole 8 gigs just for the apps and mounting the external SD as /sdcard, just like on HTC Android devices.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] rdy2go:
I would never change my desire to laggy Samsung despite better screen and faster cpu. Software makes all the difference.

Current ROMs for galaxy cannot even utilize all the available RAM which is the primary cause of lagging. It was never the case with Desire and Nexus One.

Wait to see if froyo update will resolve known issues.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Mithent:
I chose the Galaxy S over the Desire for an upgrade, based on the better hardware. My impressions:

Screen is nice, though reduced text quality due to PenTile is noticeable if you look for it. (However, both the Desire and Nexus One use PenTile on worse screens.) The contrast ratio didn't blow me away as much as I thought it might, but it is very good. Overall I'd still prefer a decent LCD, but if I stop looking for jagged text then the screen is good.

Coming from a 528MHz ARM11 Windows Mobile device, I don't really even notice frequent lag on the stock JF4 firmware I'm currently running - maybe I'm just more accepting that programs might take a couple of seconds to open, since it's so much better than what I used to have? Generally the device is extremely snappy and much more usable than my old Touch Pro.

However, the GPS isn't great at the moment. Hoping for a fix on that (Samsung have acknowledged it and said they're working on it), but at the moment it gets a lock reasonably well, but then keeps losing it and the position jumps around.

Supplied in-ear earphones are weird. I'd like to replace them.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] andrewluecke:
The lag you hear about is VERY overrated. It's people whinging that their applications don't start immediately and they need to wait 2 or 3 seconds sometimes (oh noez).

It's really not that bad. In my opinion, a lot of it is overreacting. I also suspect a lot of these pro users switch between many apps often, which basically generates a worse case scenario.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] rdy2go:
Lag problem overrated? Search YouTube for videos demonstrating the issue and judge yourself.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Beowulf_pt:
I have been messing around intensely with one for one day and so far tend to agree that the lag issue is a bit overrated. But there are indeed moments of lag and pauses (seen up to 4s pauses while IO was happening).

The GPS issue on the other hand is a clear disaster. That alone is a deal breaker for me so I might return it next week.

The screen is indeed outstanding tho.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] OlegZh:
This is a very good phone. Running jm2 firmware without any fixes. Works like a charm including GPS(I do not have much experience with it though). The screen is very good being readable on the sunlight. I use it alot as an ebook reader. Also the device is very fast. I admit there are lags sometimes but nothing terrible or annoying.

Currently waiting for Froyo. :-)
[Galaxy S I9000 General] darkoroje:
I am sorry but the lag is not overrated, and is significantly worse than Nexus One, or an iPhone 3GS or 4. The pauses happen not only when opening applications but also when creating shortcuts to applications, opening application lists or when the phone is scanning media. Something is obviously very wrong with either the hardware or the stock firmware the phone comes with in the UK.

As for the GPS, I was trying it again today while driving, and during the two hour drive it was not able to acquire lock at all.

Other than these two issues it is a fine phone.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Mithent:
I don't deny the existence of the lag, but also I don't find it to be a huge problem in my admittedly short ownership of the SGS so far (on stock T-Mobile UK firmware for now).

Then again, I've not used another Android device before, so maybe I have lower expectations compared to those who have.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] dark_sith:
http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=747260

do you need more reasons to buy it ;-)
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Fireloon:
1st of all I must say that I only have my SGS for a week so I'm sure a lot of the people that post here have alot more experience with the phone.

Having said that, so far I love the phone.

I am not having any GPS issues. And I leave in Greece!!! I've tried Navigon and NDrive. Next I'll give CoPilot a shot just to decide which to keep. Am running JM2 firmware.

I do have a bit of lag but using a task manager makes a lot of difference. Anyway isn't a bit of lag to be expected when you're running more than 10 apps?

TouchWiz looks very nice to me. I have installed Launcher Pro and ADW Launcher but haven't really used them much. So far I see no reason too.

Apart from all that I love how the phone looks and feels in my hands. As for the screen... it's just amazing.

Am having trouble finding a case for it atm. But I'm guessing that will be dealt with soon.

The only think I don't like atm is that I can't get Kies to recognise the phone on my Win7 x64bit laptop. Not that I really need to but I hate when things don't work. Somehow though I believe that issue will be resolved whether by a Samsung, a Windows or a Dell update.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] AllGamer:
yet more reason to buy the SGS

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=716790 :D
[Galaxy S I9000 General] _ray_:
hi guys,

just curious if the 2 softkeys on the bottom of the phone are capacative and if they are used to answer phone calls.

cheers
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Case_:
Yes. And no. It's Menu and Back.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] _ray_:
thx.. the reason why am asking is because my last touch screen had resistive buttons and screen and whenever i took it out of my pocket to recieve call it either got d/c or answered without me knowing it.. so i dont wanna end up with the same crap... so how do u answer the call. i know on desire you have to unlock the phone and then answer but wat bout galaxy ?
[Galaxy S I9000 General] eaglesteve:
I would not buy it if time is to wind back:

- too laggy, despite how it looks on paper. I find it not really useable fir even stuffs like emails and RSS feeds.

- GPS isn't working.

- Kies software isn't working, so you can't sync to outlook without being forced to surrender personal information to Google b

- the back button, not being a real button, causes users to accidentally lose what they're doing too easily.

- the placement if the power button makes accidental switch off too easily, or makes holding the device unnatural.

- Android is already poorly designed in it's copy/cut and paste so it's clumpsy to use even with a dedicated hardware cursor mover, let alone not having one like in SGS.

It has fantastic screen, but the above weaknesses make this a non recommended device for me.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] dagrim1:
Sorry but in response to this:

- No lag at all here with the lagfix (every now and then a little without it, but certainly not unusable)

- GPS working just fine

- No experience with KIES, just now that it worked (installed, detected phone) but never really used it.

- Back button, never had a problem with it...

- I find that you have to press the power pretty hard, pretty much impossible to press it accidently

- There are cursor options in the included swype keyboard

The galaxy s is a great phone, not perfect but pretty damn good. Have high hopes for the next froyo update (august/september).
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Beowulf_pt:
I tend to agree with almost everything after 48h of very intense use. There is one exception... the GPS. Right now I would not recommend this unit unless the user does not want to use GPS at all. To me it is pretty much as if it has NO GPS at all. Comments like your "GPS working just fine" leave me puzzled. Either people don't know what it is used for (doubt it) or at the very least there are SERIOUS problems when it comes to consistency in quality control... and that would mean hardware issues/different batches or something Samsung and BCM aren't talking about.

The other problems are not critical and in most cases there are work-arounds do the the flexibility that Android provides.

I want to love this product but right now the GPS part has to be fixed or it is a deal breaker. Especially since it is nothing new... it's basically rather old tech, even in the form of a recent integrated chipset. If I disliked it in general it would be a lot easier to dismiss it due to the pathetic GPS problems... but unfortunately the rest is rather... captivating and that's what makes it all so annoying.

It's like the proverbial girlfriend that is oh so pretty and fascinating but has that single nasty intolerable flaw that you know you won't be able to live with. You will always respect it and admire its many qualities, but sooner or later your money will slide to a different target. *cof*HTC*cof*
[Galaxy S I9000 General] andrewluecke:
How often does it scan the media? Only when you finish copying stuff off your computer. Computers lag when doing that too, are you claiming they are dodgy? The difference is that they only scan during idle time generally (except spotlight, which first time scan is always a normal priority I think). Maybe someone should recommend to Samsung to allow the scans only to happen during times of idle activity, or when applications access the indexed data (which implies they need them at once).

And you create shortcuts how often? What, is it 10 or 20 a day. Or are you now complaining about the 10secs you waste a month? Once again though, this would be a software issue, because clearly the software isn't caching the application list.

And the applications list only lags for me the first time after I mess around with installed apps (because it needs to rebuild the list). After that, its cached. Samsung could maybe improve this further by rebuilding the list immediately after all currently installing apps are finished installing. This way it is ready when you get there.

In recent builds, I haven't heard of anyone getting 45s or long lags either. Not since JG5. In fact, I only ever recall getting 1 long stall, when using the video camera, and that was in JF4 or JG1. Samsung specifically posted JG5 to improve responsiveness in low memory situations. Waiting 2 or 3 secs to open apps only should affect you if you get frustrated easily. However, I'm testing now opening many apps (I have opened approx 10), I have no external SD card, and I have no task killer. The longest any app took to load to at least splash was approx 2secs (google sky). This was in JG5. And sometimes when clicking home it took 1/2secs (oh nos).

So, really, yes, overated. I believe though that maybe similar to some tinnitus sufferers, some people become so focused on the problem that they blow it out of proportion. How many people STILL whinging about lag have had long pauses recently?

I'd say that the situation isn't ideal, and yes, the situation isn't as good as other phones currently (there are obvious improvements which can be made) BUT, frankly, anyone who has time to paste here probably isn't so busy as being affected by 5secs of lag a day..

Have the people who are complaining ACTUALLY been affected by bad lag recently (longer than 3 secs) is what I'm wondering (honestly). Because some people are going as far as to say the phone is unusable in it's current state of lag. It might be worse than the N1 or iPhone, but it doesn't make the phone unusable..

The GPS is totally broken though on JG5 (was fine on earlier builds for me), and that should be the clear priority at the moment for samsung (because the lag doesn't make the phone unusable, but the GPS is unusable for many in recent builds).
[Galaxy S I9000 General] darkoroje:
I am sorry but Samsung has not posted any new firmware. All the firmwares talked about in your post are leaked ones. Installing them voids the warranty. Until there is an official lag free firmware available the problem has not been solved.

As for the GPS I am puzzled why some are saying it works fine for them. If that is indeed the case a significant number of Galaxy phones have a hardware problem since the gps in my phone is definitely not working properly.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] djglenn1337:
It means that the Desire has a better Build Quality, as in its not as plastic as the Galaxy S.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] andrewluecke:
I thought JG5 was a final one?

It is possible that the GPS is working for others intermittently, and is dependent on firmware. It is possible there were different GPS chip revisions and the drivers don't properly handle some too.

Also, it's highly questionable if they void the warranty? I've never heard of anyone having their warranty canceled for iPod's with Rockbox for instance. It's possible Samsung would, but not confirmed. But as always there is a risk. It all depends probably on whether there is evidence software is causing the issue, or whether it's definitely hardware related.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] darkoroje:
Until a firmware appears on Samsung Kies, or is distributed by your carrier, it cannot be considered final. Remember that the vast majority of Galaxy S users do not frequent these forums and have no idea of the existence of the leaked versions.

Flashing a non-official firmware does void the warranty. This is especially the case if you have a carrier supplied phone (e.g. Vodaphone). Of course, you may get lucky and they may not check or indeed know what the firmware version should be.

I don't think we should be justifying the obvious lack of Q&A that went into this phone. On my phone the Android Navigation application has not been able to get GPS lock ever - not even one single time. Now either my phone is broken, or Samsung has not tested it sufficiently.

As for lag, the perception of it will depend to a large degree to user expectations. If you had not used Android before, it may appear normal. However, as I said before, compared to Nexus One the lag is significant
[Galaxy S I9000 General] RyanZA:
This is how I use the GPS:

Open google maps navigation (brut mod so that it works in my country).

Talk/Type an address.

Drive while following the prompts/on screen map.

End up at destination.

What else would anybody use a GPS for? SGS works perfectly for this!

I guess if I was flying a jet, I might need a better GPS? I'd buy a nice commercial airplane GPS then like one of these - http://www.gca.aero/list.asp?search_type=6&search_text=2 - $10 000 - little bit more expensive than the SGS.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] RyanZA:
Your phone is definitely broken. Mine gets a lock every time. Take it back.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] darkoroje:
In that case there is an awful lot of broken phones out there since this problem is reported

on all Galaxy forums by many customers
[Galaxy S I9000 General] katinsh:
I personally am waiting for a new stable version of SGS without laggs and bad gps. I am very setissfied about this situation, because I already have sold my Xperia =(
[Galaxy S I9000 General] dakine:
Yes, especially if you live in europe you have no better option if you want android.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] RyanZA:
There could be a ton of broken phones. I doubt it though.

Either way, if your phone cannot lock onto any satellites and never acquires a lock, then it is definitely a hardware problem and you should take your phone back. Doesn't matter how many other phones are broken - if yours is broken, take it back before you run out of warranty or return time, etc.

Software problem is if your phone locks onto satellites but the signal jumps all over and does strange things. Hardware problem is when your phone cannot use the GPS at all.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] AllGamer:
what i found is that it only jumps around if you use gps tracing softwares, the same problem is on HTC phones and Blackberry

if you use it for navigating, it works perfectly

tracing software will tracer whatever the gps picks up as you walk or drive, some places it's hard to get a lock, that is what makes the tracing software jumps around, as it tries to reposition itself.

even using a pure GPS device has that problem.

the SGS picks up satellites in less than 5 sec, then it takes about 3 to 6 sec to lock on to 3+ to start working properly, to get an accurate position you need at least 4 locks

but 3 will work but that is what gives you the weird stuff on the tracing software, if you use navigation software it works fine

i constantly get 8 of 8 using the gps test software
[Galaxy S I9000 General] freshko:
About GPS...

In the past 3 weeks I have been using navigation for more than 8 hours for different destinations (also one 5 hour long). And I did not lose the position even once while it took me approximately 30 seconds to get the position at the beginning. I have SGS from Germany, running i9000XXJP3 and Navigon for android. So I really do not feel that the GPS issue would prevent someone from buying SGS.

However, there are certain lags from time to time, but I believe that new official firmware will remove it completely.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] RyanZA:
If you haven't disabled JIT on your JP3, then the lags you are seeing are from the broken JIT implementation in the test froyo builds. If you disable JIT then the lagging is mostly gone.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] darkoroje:
I am really puzzled why there are such different experiences with GPS.if it was only my phone I would believe that it is broken but there are so many reports from so many users that there must be some reason behind it . Hope

fully Samsung can fix whatever the problem is.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] RyanZA:
On the earlier firmwares, the position you get from the GPS is very erratic - it jumps around your real location occasionally. These reports about the GPS being bad is because of this.

You seem to have a different problem - your GPS can't even see any satellites. That means your GPS is probably broken. Download a GPS test app from the market and make sure it really can't lock onto satellites. If it can't then you need to return your phone!
[Galaxy S I9000 General] freshko:
How can you disable JIT?
[Galaxy S I9000 General] AllGamer:
also some people mess around with their GPS settings, and it does weird things.

in which case a simple Wipe "factory settings restore" and erasing all data will fix it.

i learned that when i was testing out the several things people mentioned to "improve" the GPS lock, and in the end, the factory default was the best.