Update: On 2/28/11 I obtained the Odin software needed to upgrade the phone to the leaked and jail broken Froyo Androidcentral forums. The procedure went exactly as described and now I have what the phone should have been delivered with. The changes aren't vast but they are significant. The biggest change is that during post-installation setup you get to choose not to use Bing and after that the search works as you would hope, with Google, even from the search button. Some applications suddenly admit they can work as widgets. It's a nice detail cleanup that the phone should originally have shipped with and seems to undo the heavy handed commercial damage Verizon did to line their pockets. No guarantees the official version will be as nice though, if it ever arrives. This may not now be the best Android phone, but they have worked out well for us. End of update.
We got two of these phones three weeks ago, since then we have found a lot that we like and a little that we really dislike. The dislikes are all things Verizon did to the software.
In the comments someone points out that it may be possible to just burn Android 2.2 on to the phone. That is rumored, but isn't something most people will do. The rumor mill says Spain will get the Froyo release in late October '10 and people are going to try using that. Verizon has also announced that they will make the Google search engine available on the official 2.2 release, however they won't be making it the search engine for other services, so when another application starts a search it will still be redirected through the Verizon search portal to Bing. So this is no real improvement over deleting the Bing boxes and installing Google from the marketplace, so their big announcement saves you a couple of minutes whilst making no difference to the software. Another method is to rip-off the Google search elements from another Galaxy S model and install that and a third party application launcher which will then use it, but this is probably more low level messing around than most users will want to do. They shouldn't need to. If you decide to do that you need the SDK, which you can download for free, and some instructions you can find in the Android forums.
Verizon has disabled some of the functionality of Google's Android operating system and replaced it with their own shoddy software in a cynical attempt to con people in to paying them more. The Google search engine has been excised from the system and replaced with Bing, you can't remove Bing from the system and you can't replace it for some purposes. I don't want earn money for Verizon by allowing MS to show me things MS is being paid to sell me. I'd rather they pay Google to show me things they have been paid to sell me because I prefer their style. It seems a fair return to Google for providing free maps and navigation.
But anyway... as well as removing Google's search functionality they have also removed Google's GPS functionality and maps. That has been replaced by Verizon Navigator and Bing maps. Verizon Navigator is very poor and is expensive. Why should I pay ten bucks a month for a poor application that replaces the free one that Google built into the Android operating system? I had hoped that using Android would mean I didn't have to put up with Verizon's tinkering with the O/S. My past experience would suggest that they aren't very good at it.
Happily you can download Google apps from the ap store, but you can't re-integrate them into the phone. You also can't eliminate the bloated load of garbage that Verizon added as a revenue minefield for the unwary. If you could I'd have deleted a whole bunch of it by now, things like VCAST, VZNavigator, City ID, Skype and Blockbuster. It's not just that they are there, even though I don't use them they get started and use battery and performance; right now my phone is running voice commands, music player, video player, car cradle, bing, City ID and Skype mobile - I haven't started any of those. I might use the music and video players but the others are either entirely unwanted or just useless.
As an alternative to paying ten bucks a month for Verizon Navigator (No, really, don't do that), you can use Google which is probably the best navigation deal for the phone. Alternatively Waze is a popular and sometimes amusing collaborative GPS solution. If you are going to be off the network CoPilot looks like very good value, for $20 you get a full GPS with maps of the whole of North America. CoPilot plotted a route from San Jose CA to Vancouver BC in a couple of seconds, a Motorola TN765T costs a couple of hundred bucks and won't do that, it can't route across borders.
When you use the Samsung car cradle, which is very good, it automatically starts the car mode. Unfortunately that just offers all the pre-installed pay-per-use software and no apparent way to customize it. Surely there must be?
Now the good stuff.
Android 2.2 Froyo may be available around October '10 for this phone, that is rumored to significantly improve performance.
This is a really fast little computer with a network connection and a phone application. The menus fly around, most of the time. Occasionally they get bogged down, no idea why, but this is a known issue and supposed to be fixed in v2.2. You can scroll through long lists with the flick of a finger. It's pretty easy to set it up to connect to wireless networks. Bonding to a Bluetooth headset was simple. The device arrives with a 16Gb MicroSD card and I expect that will keep me happy for a while.
The camera seems nice enough from the few pictures I have taken. The LED flash is years ahead of the LG Dare, it actually illuminates the image pretty well and doesn't turn it all blue. It works. The shutter is a bit slow, but I was trying to take pictures of our black cat who wouldn't sit still! Video quality is also excellent, it does a better job of compressing 720p video than my Panasonic camera.
Once Google maps was downloaded the GPS turned out to be pretty useful, if I have any further comments on that I will be back. I used it to make my 50 mile trip home, I usually use an old Garmin GPS which is pretty much accurate to the minute, Google agreed to within two minutes. For me the voice navigation was useless, but maybe it just doesn't work on deep English voices? I'll let my better half try and report back. If I had had to use the voice entry I'd still be stuck at work.
The live wallpaper is really trick, something MS tried to do years ago on Windows and caused a lot of crashing. The standard background is a sort of fake rock pool, the 'water' ripples when you touch the screen. I switched to the live map background, for now at least, it shows the local map... with traffic. Phones have certainly come a long way in the last few decades.
Loading music was fairly easy, you need to set the USB in to sync mode, but after that it will talk to Windows Media Player. Initially I tried Winamp but that doesn't work, or at least it was easier to just switch to Media Player than to experiment, so that's what I did. I dragged some albums on the the phone and then told it to sync and it did. Not as fast as loading an iPod, but fast enough. The music player on the phone isn't fantastic in the UI area, but it works. I'll certainly try something else though.
I thought I had problems using the device on a charger, but then I noticed that I had got the cable mixed up with one connected to some appalling no-name Chinese charger, swapping to the Samsung charger fixed the issue... but something to be aware of if you plan to recycle all your old micro-USB gear for use on the new phone.
Would I do it again? Would I still buy this over the Droid X or 2? Yes. I'm not returning it tonight, but I will probably be rooting it so that I can eliminate the annoying Verizon bloatware. This reminds me of the days when MS integrated IE into Windows, they got in to deep legal problems and I don't see how Verizon/MS removing Google functionality is different.
If you want to use this in a car I recommend you get the Samsung windshield mount and a car charger with a long enough straight cable to reach where you decide to put it. The Samsung mount is very good compared to the collection of broken generic ones I have used in the past, the only down side is that neither it nor the phone come with a suitable power supply. Verizon has the mount and there are many MicroUSB chargers on Amazon. As stated earlier you should probably avoid the no-name types and stick to a major manufacturer, I have used LG, Samsung and Motorola chargers and a USB cable connected to HP and Dell computers, so I don't think it is too choosy about chargers. Samsung Fascinate Android Phone (Verizon Wireless)'
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