Samsung Galaxy S Review

The GT-I9000 is where the whole line starts, and it is a better phone than its reputation for lag suggests. The 4.0-inch Super AMOLED, which only the Bada powered Samsung Wave had carried before, bonded the touch layer into the panel, so blacks were black and the screen was readable outdoors in a way the Nexus One's AMOLED was not. The 1 GHz Hummingbird, a Cortex-A8 beside a PowerVR SGX540, ran games nothing else on Android could touch that year.

Then the compromises. Samsung's RFS filesystem stalled the phone on every write, so a generation of owners rooted it for the Voodoo lag fix; the GPS took minutes to lock or never did, and the firmware patches only partly cured it; the 5 megapixel camera had no flash at all. In the US it arrived as four carrier variants, the T-Mobile Vibrant, AT&T Captivate, Sprint Epic 4G and Verizon Fascinate, at $199.99 on a two year contract and $449.99 without one, which is the price used here.

Updates were the sore point: Froyo reached the US phones months after Europe, Gingerbread took until 2011 or 2012 depending on the carrier, and Ice Cream Sandwich never came officially, because Samsung said TouchWiz would not fit beside it. More than twenty million sales bought the Galaxy name its standing. The S II, the next spring, fixed nearly everything wrong here.