[Galaxy S I9000 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] richardbroder:
Happy? I can say so, but it could be better....

What makes me happy

-Where I live, the unbranded SGS costs half the price of a factory unlocked iPhone 4, so you can say it is great value, yea

-Hummingbird = fastest processor out there, no more

-Screen, it might not have the same resolution of the iPhone 4, but that doesn´t really matter much, the iPhone 4 has pixel density you can´t really notice, in the other hand, SGS has perfect contrast and colors that you CAN notice...

-It´s a really good overall device, once you got it all tweaked...

What makes me sad

-Having to spend days (might I even say weeks) digging, reading and learning about the device, just to get it to be as good as it should be right out of the box (or at least as good as it should be through Samsung´s own official updates)... I was used to Nokia´s Symbian devices, and although they´re not even close as good, Nokia will constantly launch updates for your phone (and good ones btw - you can really notice the improvements for every update), and it´s all done clean, through their desktop software (tecnically, Nokia does what Samsung SHOULD do through Kies), all your personal data is kept intact, it´s really practical... then I think about all the work to get an SGS up and running niceley, have to flash it through odin, root it, lagfix it, do a manual backup, wich is quite alot of work... and for every new decent update I´ll have to do it all over, since you can´t rely on Kies for updates.... geesh... I just wonder what is Samsung´s concept of product support, that is if they even know what product support means. I mean, hell, they´ve sold over 3 MILLION Galaxy S devices worldwide, and this is the kind of support we get? I just wonder what Samsung does with not-so-popular devices... it´s quite scary if you think about it... and it´s sad to know that Samsung will probably totally abandon costumer-support for the SGS once it launches a proper successor...

-GPS: SGS´s achilles´ heel. This really IS a problem in a phone that could be otherwise technically perfect. Samsung´s Galaxy S GPS is a real piece of crap. Yes, it does work, and with A-GPS I can get real quick satellite lock, but that´s all. Precision is a piece of crap, driving in cities with high building-densities is near-impossible, sometimes I need to STOP my car just so that the phone´s GPS will catch up with my location... that is, when it actually manages to figure out my correct location, since it´s not hard to see the phone showing me in a street that´s actually one block away from the street I´m in....

Have used JP5, JP6, now I´m on JPC, none of them really changed anything in the GPS, it´s just as bad... and I´m sorry to say that, I think it´s GPS will never really be good....

And why do I think that? Well, it´s simple... for me, the obvious reason for it´s GPS beeing so bad is not really software-related, but hardware related... SGS´s GPS is a piece of crap simply because it´s GPS antenna is too bad. And I already have a trauma with that, since my old Nokia N97 had the same problem - weak GPS antenna. And although N97´s GPS was really sad, it still managed to work MUCH better then SGS´s GPS, I guess I might just be unlucky with my mobile phone´s GPS systems. What´s actually ironic about it all is that my first GPS-phone, the pre-historic N95-1, actually had GREAT and precise satellite-lock, it really did work as a navigation gadget...

N97 owners did find a workaround, it was a hardware-mod where you would actually solder a thin copper wire to the device´s original GPS antenna, that increased it´s GPS accuracy in more then 300% and made it usable, the good thing for N97 owners was that the N97 actually had internal free-space for this mod, I don´t think this will ever be an option for the SGS....

For all of those waiting for a magical firmware GPS-fix, I´m nearly 100% sure it won´t fix the GPS. Yes, it might optimize SGS´s weak antenna with good software parameters, just like Nokia did with the N97... the stock non-modded N97 did receive firmware updates that significantly improved it´s GPS accuracy, but none of them never really made the N97´s GPS GOOD, they just left it less worse, and that´s exactly the same thing I think will happen with the SGS...

So overall, despite Samsung´s hard work in giving the worse customer-support in the universe, if you have the time and patience for it, you can actually turn your SGS into one of the best devices out there, if not the best... just forget about the GPS, it´s crap, and I don´t think it will ever be good, even if it does get better...