Actually how about close?
Ridiculously close.
In my Pocket.
In my pocket resides a Galaxy of information. Damn that was cheesy -maybe the boys at Engadget can appreciate my interstellar, dare i say Jedi-like segue abilities...ehem. In my pocket lives the Internet. A handheld, hot-rodded portal to the cloud that is shockingly close to desktop performance.
I'm talking about Samsung's Galaxy S smartphone. The Phone that is being launched on every carrier. The International smartphone that is taking over the world. It has a bunch of different names based on which carrier. It even looks a bit different from one to the next, but at it's core the Galaxy S has the same internal hardware that will potentially spank all that came before it. You'll know it when you see it too because the gorgeous Super-Amoled display will seduce your eyes with it's rich colors and deep blacks.
Here's the Specs
Samsung Galaxy S
GENERAL 2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network HSDPA 900 / 1900 / 2100
SIZE Dimensions 122.4 x 64.2 x 9.9 mm
Weight 119 g
DISPLAY Type Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
Size 480 x 800 pixels, 4.0 inches
- TouchWiz 3.0 UI
- Multi-touch input method
- Accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate
- Touch-sensitive controls
- Proximity sensor for auto turn-off
- Swype text input
SOUND Alert types Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones
Speakerphone Yes
- 3.5 mm audio jack
MEMORY Phonebook Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records Practically unlimited
Internal 8 GB/16GB storage, 512 MB RAM, 2GB ROM
Card slot microSD, up to 32GB, buy memory
DATA GPRS Class 12 (4+1/3+2/2+3/1+4 slots), 32 - 48 kbps
EDGE Class 12
3G HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps
WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n; DLNA
Bluetooth Yes, v3.0 with A2DP
Infrared port No
USB Yes, v2.0 microUSB
CAMERA Primary 5 MP, 2592 x 1944 pixels, autofocus
Features Geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection
Video Yes, 720p@30fps
Secondary Yes, VGA
FEATURES OS Android OS, v2.1 (Eclair)
CPU ARM Cortex A8 1GHz processor
Messaging SMS(threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Mail, IM, RSS
Browser HTML
Radio Mono FM radio with RDS
Games Yes
Colors Black and Grey
GPS Yes, with A-GPS support
Java Via third party application
- Social networking integration
- Digital compass
- MP4/DivX/WMV/H.264/H.263 player
- MP3/WAV/eAAC+/AC3/FLAC player
- TV-out
- Organizer
- Image/video editor
- Document editor (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF)
- Google Search, Maps, Gmail,
YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk, Picasa integration
- Flash Lite v3.1
- Voice memo/dial/commands
- T9
BATTERY Standard battery, Li-Po 1500 mAh
Stand-by Up to 750 h (2G) / Up to 576 h (3G)
Talk time Up to 13 h 30 min (2G) / Up to 6 h 30 min (3G)
Originally, I almost didn't get this phone. Both me and my wife Lacey are T-Mobile customers and Android lovers and we watched all these second generation devices spring up everywhere else but T-mobile. She had the original MyTouch and I had a Motorola Cliq -which for all you nay sayers was actually a bad ass, highly responsive little phone once it was rooted and set up properly. On our present income it just wasn't an option to fork out a thousand bones on a couple of Nexus Ones so we stood by and watched the Droid, Droid Incredible, and Evo from afar hoping our good ol' T-mo would give us some love. They did:) When they announced the Galaxy S I was very excited but after talking with my wife decided to wait untill the holidays in case something else came out that would be better. Then I listened to a podcast that summed it up basically saying quit being scared, go buy the latest greatest, you know something is going to be better, then get more money and buy that too. That is a great idea! I'll just get more money later and buy that one too. I'll get that money by selling my current phone on E-bay! Thats what I did but unfortunately this seasoned street-smart guy didn't get paid for the phone and was dumb enough to ship it to Nigeria...needless to say I was determined to get a new phone and luckily for me and my wife our first anniversary was August 9th so we were able to buy each other a new phone among other things:) One more thing would have kept me from buying the Galaxy S and that would be if T-Mobile sold the Dell Streak. I am very glad now they didn't, and for those of you going "what?! why the Streak?", I don't care if my Android device is technically a phone. I hardly call people anyway, that extra inch on the screen would be nice. That being said I'm more than happy with my decision.
The Galaxy S is not the fastest phone out there out of the box. Earlier I said it would potentially spank all thats out there. In fact with a simple file system hack my phone does spank the rest in the controversial Quadrant benchmark...but gets eaten alive in Linpack.
Thats because out of the box the Galaxy S ships with Android 2.1 Éclair not the latest version 2.2 Froyo which uses Just-In-Time compilation for much of it's Java processing. Considering that the entire top half of the O.S. and most of it's applications are written in Java, it's no wonder that devices running 2.2 Froyo see a 2-5X speed increase over previous versions of Android. The good news is that Samsung has confirmed that all the Galaxy S line will get the 2.2 upgrade soon. I wanted that confirmation before I got the phones.
So that this post isn't just me spewing out a bunch of incoherent nonsense (too late), I wanted to say why this phone kicks ass. That my good friends can be summed up with one word.. but i will continue afterword with more words:
CHOICE
I had the choice to root the phone, which I did and change the operating system in anyway I choose. It was easier on this phone than any other phone i have owned or moddified. I flashed a custom kernel, courtesy of the good folks at XDA Developers and specifically a smart person known as JustAnotherCrowd.
I will admit this phone had some problems out of the box. In Samsung's defense they weren't problems in the normal sense, the phone worked fine. I just thought it should be faster considering the amount of RAM and CPU speed, and so did some other folks hence all the "Lag-fixes" going around. I also wanted to Over-Clock the CPU and see how well this one did. I gotta say that without any hardware mods I have a 20% increase in clock speed (courtesy of JAC's kernel) which is almost unheard of in desktop standards.
I changed the launcher from the original Touch-Wiz -I hate saying that, to ADW launcher. I like Touch-Wiz over all however. they did more things right in my book than wrong.
The point is that this phone out of the box is better in my opinion by far in looks and performance than the iPhone-4 and any Blackbery device on the market. But the fact that someone like me can go buy one and easily change anything i want i really make it MY device in every way is what Android is all about, and if I want to leave it alone and still bet it's all going to work and work well, it will do that too.
The Galaxy S nails that concept on the head.
I would like to say thanks to all the great people at XDA, and all the others in the Android community for making this mobile revolution such a blast.
