[Vibrant General] boomerbubba:
@lmlloyd,

The fact is that the Galaxy S is a new, high-end smartphone positioned at the top of the market. It is not unreasonable to expect it to perform up to the state of the art. Yet, you admit it cannot even match the current GPS performance of the now-retired G1. Amazingly, you think that is okay.

As for giving Samsung and T-Mobile more time to fix this by correcting the defects in the product as-released, if you read my posts you will see that I have not given up on the Vibrant and Broadcom's high-end GPS chip. (They ought to perform quite well, and better drivers and firmware are supposed to be in the pipeline.) I'm the customer here, and I am gambling that there will be remedial fixes to the GPS bugs -- even though the manufacturer and carrier will not commit that these future fixes, will, in fact, materialize. I just choose not to risk a two-year, two-thousand dollar commitment yet on that hope.

If T-Mobile made its return policies more open-ended, then customers might be more willing to gamble on future remediation. But the vendor's terms say that after 14 or 30 days, depending on how we buy the device, we are stuck with it whether its bugs get fixed or not.

Yes, I have high expectations, and I do want to use and develop increasingly sophisticated apps that require a relatively high degree of accuracy, such as geocoding. Not all users care as much about that, but many do. Your attitude seems to be the opposite of what you accuse me of (having expectations that are too high). You seem to argue that it is acceptable to meet only the low expectations of the least demanding users, who just care about basic street navigation that is correct most of the time. If this were a $50 "feature phone," your standard might be appropriate. But the Vibrant costs 10 times that much.

Besides, you need only read the many complaints in the many forum threads about the GPS flaws to know that there are symptoms much more gross than your narrowly framed questions about fine accuracy admit. In many situations, users report errors that are just off the wall. So while answering your interrogatory has been interesting, the questions you pose do not cover all the issues that plague this design. I personally have seen my Vibrant -- while telling me that it has achieved accuracy within 25 feet -- place me hundreds of feet away from my actual position! Others have reported similar results, not to mention other problems such as failure to achieve satellite lock at all.

So I will continue to demand that this top-shelf smartphone meet a higher standard than you do. We will just have to agree to disagree on how good is good enough.

EDIT p.s. I have to note a bit of intellectual dishonesty on your part. You misquoted me. I did not say the phone was, in general, "useless." In fact, I have acknowledged that it can be used for street-nav and be right most of the time when it does get a lock. I did report, accurately, that other users have reported its performance on athletic runs to be useless because their captured tracks wander all over. But that is just one of the examples of geographic apps I mentioned, where accuracy is required and expected, that you conveniently ignored. In your analysis, users just have no business wanting such precise apps to work.

You also declare, citing no evidence other than your own opinion, that my GPS standards are higher than most members of this forum. But polls here and here indicate the opposite: Only a tiny minority say they are satisfied with the GPS performance on the Galaxy S. So it seems that it is your argument for lower standards that is out of the mainstream.

The meme that this is all the customers' fault for having high expectations just won't hold up. That phony argument, which is pretty evident in the self-serving PR statements of Samsung and echoed in your rant, is all your comment amounts to.