[Vibrant General] lmlloyd:
So anything short of WAAS-level accuracy, you consider unacceptable. Got it. Then I think the vast majority of phones will fail to meet with your approval.

I find it ironic that you choose to use the G1 by name. When I first got my G1 (on launch) the very first thing that jumped out at me was how utterly useless the GPS was compared to the WinMo handheld I had been using before. It took at least 5 minutes to get any closer than 100 meters, and would often put me as much as a mile away from my actual position. Of course after two years of updates, and Google refining how Maps handles aGPS, before I switched to the Vibrant, the GPS on the G1 was performing wonderfully. As it stands right now, the Vibrant is certainly worse than the current performance of the G1, but my Vibrant is FAR better than the G1 was when it was released. If I took your attitude, I would have returned my G1 then and there, and gone back to WinMo.

No, actually it isn't at all like asking what a computer can do. I didn't ask what GPS might be used for, I asked what is your specific application that requires better than 10M accuracy? You don't need 2M accuracy to check in with Foursquare, and a friend looking for you with Latitude will surely be able to just shout out to you if he is 10M off your current location. If you are within 10M of where you took a photo, and you have a photo, then it shouldn't take more than a second to figure out where you were actually standing. 10M is more than accurate enough for street navigation, and any traffic, crowd analysis or scientific application designed to run on sometimes-connected phones, which doesn't take into account at least a ±10M deviation, is not very well written, as that is a pretty common error margin for aGPS phones.

The bottom line here is that you have a much higher expectation of accuracy than the average user, and in fact it would seem than most users here. You are factually correct that the device cannot meet your expectations at present, however, you go off the rails when you start trying to represent the phone as being utterly useless, just because it fails to meet standards you have arbitrarily set, which do not match the actual use case for the majority of people. It only makes your complaints look more shrill that pretty much everyone can agree that the compass is indeed useless for any application that might need to access it.

How 'useful' something is, cannot exist in a vacuum. Use case has to be taken into account, not an arbitrary number one man has set as his personal threshold of what he finds acceptable. The compass fails this test. Any attempt to use the compass for anything will turn up noticeable errors and lag for all users in any use case. However the GPS, for the average use case, seems to be in acceptable limits for the majority of users, whether you feel their assessment is subjective or not. Thus, your characterization of the GPS as useless, is itself useless, because all you are really saying is that you are not personally pleased with its performance, and then trying to inflate your own opinion as being an objective statement of indisputable fact.

[edit] Oh, and just to attempt to forestall your inevitable rant about fanboys making excuses for Samsung because they love them so much, this is literally the first Samsung product I have ever owned, and wasn't actually the phone I really wanted to begin with. I had been holding out for a high-end phone with a hardware keyboard, preferably from HTC, but I lost my G1, and this was the best Android phone T-Mobile had at the time. So please, don't bother me with fanboy this and fanboy that. I just posting because I get sick of seeing intellectual bullies attempting to score rhetorical victories through sheer bluster and verbosity, rather than actually attempting any form of dialog.