The “excellent” Android Flagship That Wasn’t
Everyone remembers the original Galaxy S as an instant classic. I’m not fully convinced it deserves the spotless reputation.
On paper, the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S looked like the apex predator of early Android: 4-inch Super AMOLED, 1GHz Hummingbird, HD video, and TouchWiz on top of Android 2.1 with a promised Froyo drizzle. In practice, it was a lot more nuanced – brilliant in some areas, compromised in others, and very Samsung in its priorities.
Design: Super AMOLED First, Everything Else Second
The Galaxy S measures 122.4 x 64.2 x 9.9mm and weighs 118g. For a phone built around a 4-inch display in that era, that was aggressively slim and light.
The chassis is all plastic, with a blue-dotted back that screams “you’ll either love me or hate me.” It’s fingerprint-prone and doesn’t feel particularly premium, but it does keep the weight down and the ergonomics solid. No metal, no glass sandwich, just a thin shell around that panel.
The display is the whole point of the design. You’re looking at a 4-inch WVGA Super AMOLED panel that essentially erased the usual trade-offs of its time. You got the deep blacks of AMOLED plus improved viewing angles and sunlight legibility because Samsung removed the separate glass layer. Outdoors, the screen still looks like print on paper; indoors, it’s borderline show-off material.
Samsung built the whole front around this screen: three keys under it (capacitive menu and back, plus a hardware home key) and a clean face with minimal distraction. The power/lock key sits high on the right, volume rocker high on the left, microUSB with a tiny plastic lid and a 3.5mm jack on top. The bottom only hosts the mic.
There are two obvious compromises. First, no dedicated camera shutter key despite a 5MP module with HD video. Second, no LED flash of any kind, which basically writes off low-light stills and video. For a device this ambitious, both omissions are hard to justify.
Under the removable back you get a hot-swappable microSD slot and a 1500 mAh Li‑Ion battery. In testing, that pack managed over three days under fairly heavy use and more than 7 hours of video playback before hitting 10% and shutting the player down. For a power phone with a bright AMOLED panel, that’s legitimately strong endurance.
Performance and TouchWiz 3.0: Speed With Opinions
Inside, the Galaxy S runs a 1GHz Cortex-A8 Hummingbird CPU paired with 512MB of RAM. Benchmarks put it slightly ahead of Snapdragon devices like the HTC Desire and Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10, not miles ahead, but enough to call it the fastest Android of its generation.
Real-world performance backs that up. The interface is smooth, lags are rare, and apps behave consistently well. Samsung’s own testing showed that even early pre-release units ran quickly, and the final hardware only improved things.
TouchWiz 3.0 sits on top of Android 2.1 Éclair. This isn’t some heavy-handed skin that tries to reinvent Android from scratch; it’s more like a long list of tweaks and nudges. You get up to seven homescreen panes with Samsung widgets (weather, finance, feeds, buddies, daily briefing), a four-icon dock that persists into the app drawer, and a horizontally scrolling app grid instead of stock Android’s vertical list.
The notification shade is smarter too, with toggles for Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and sound. That’s the kind of small change that saves you a dozen taps a day and directly helps battery life. Live wallpapers are supported with more options than the Nexus One, though using them will drain the battery faster.
Not every decision is great. The default homescreen is fixed to the leftmost pane, and you can’t choose a different one, which turns navigation into extra swipes if you fill all screens. The Smart Unlock feature seen on preview hardware didn’t make it to this unit. Overall though, TouchWiz here actually improves usability rather than just re-skinning for the sake of it.
The real wildcard was the promise of Android 2.2 Froyo. Froyo offered a claimed 2x–5x performance boost and Flash in the browser, plus app-to-SD support. The Galaxy S was clearly built with that in mind, boasting 1.8GB of internal app space on top of 8GB or 16GB of storage. In a world where phones like the Desire shipped with ~120MB of app space, Samsung’s layout was forward-thinking – at least on paper.
Media, Typing and Telephony: Built to Consume
Samsung leaned hard into the Galaxy S as a media device, and that’s where it still holds up conceptually.
For text input, the big story was Swype. Instead of pecking at keys, you drag your finger from letter to letter and the keyboard predicts the word from the path. Accuracy is surprisingly high – even oddball words like “xylophone” get recognized – and you can always tap type if you prefer. There’s a built-in tutorial that actually makes sense and helps you ramp up.
The phonebook and messaging stack use Android 2.1’s improved contacts system, Quick Contacts, and multiple account sync, plus Samsung’s swipe gestures: right-swipe on a contact to call, left-swipe to text. Same for logs and message threads. It sounds gimmicky until you use it for a week and then miss it on other devices.
Telephony is solid. Reception and in-call quality are fine, Smart Dial searches both names and numbers directly from the dial pad, and the proximity sensor handles screen blanking during calls. The one real flaw is the loudspeaker: testing rated it “Below Average,” so expect missed calls in louder environments.
On the media side, Samsung went all-in. The gallery is basically the 3D one from the Nexus One – sub-galleries by folder, date slider, pinch zoom, and fast transitions. The catch is it only shows downsized images; you can’t zoom to full 100% for true pixel peeping.
The video story is stronger. There’s a dedicated player with DivX and XviD support, 720p playback and recording at 30fps, DLNA via AllShare, and standard-def TV-out. An Outdoor visibility mode cranks brightness and contrast to keep the Super AMOLED visible outside. Early hardware had 720p video stutter, but the final units fixed it and delivered smooth recording with good detail.
The music player gets a TouchWiz skin with tabs for tracks, playlists, albums, artists and composers. You can strip out the ones you don’t care about, apply EQ presets, and even jump straight from a track to YouTube or Google search for more info. Add FM radio with RDS and an objectively excellent audio output chain – high signal-to-noise ratio, clean frequency response, low distortion – and you’ve got a serious pocket music setup.
Camera performance is more mixed. The 5MP module supports 720p video, face/smile/blink detection, image stabilization, geotagging and a raft of software features. Autofocus is fast, and the touch-to-focus UI is actually well thought out. Still image quality, though, isn’t elite-tier: visible noise, aggressive noise reduction that smears fine detail, and slightly underexposed shots, all made worse by the total lack of flash. Video fares better, especially after the stutter fix, but this was never the phone for low-light photography.
Connectivity, Apps and Samsung Dive: Early Ecosystem Play
On the connectivity front, the I9000 checks most of the right boxes for its generation: quad-band GSM with GPRS/EDGE, dual-band HSPA at up to 7.2 Mbps down and 5.76 Mbps up, Wi‑Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, and microUSB 2.0. Android 2.1 adds proper Bluetooth file transfer.
Storage is generous: 8GB or 16GB internal, plus microSD up to 32GB, and 2GB of ROM with 1.8GB free for apps. Given that Android 2.2 would later enable apps on SD and secondary internal storage, Samsung positioning here made sense.
The browser is the then-standard Android 2.1 WebKit engine with pinch-to-zoom, text reflow, and a minimalist UI that hides controls as you scroll. Multiple tabs, thumbnail bookmarks, history and a Most Visited list are all present. Full Flash support only arrives with the Froyo update; once that lands, you even get an on-demand mode to load Flash elements only when you actually want them.
Out of the box, you also get YouTube, ThinkFree Office with document editing and pinch-zoom, a capable calendar (agenda/daily/weekly/monthly views), a decent alarm app, a simple but useful My Files manager, and Google Maps with GPS and Street View. Turn-by-turn navigation is limited by Google’s rollout at the time, but the hardware GPS can lock in a few minutes even without A‑GPS.
Samsung tried to build its own app layer on top of Android’s Market. Samsung Apps hosts updates and extra widgets, while preloaded tools like AllShare (DLNA streaming), Daily Briefing, Social Hub, Write and Go, Memo, Mini Diary, Sketch Memo, and basic image/video editors target everyday use cases.
Not everything hits. The Voice Dialer is essentially a write-off – poor recognition across the board – while Google Voice Search on the same device is almost uncannily accurate.
The more interesting long-term play is Samsung Dive. This remote control service lets supported devices like the Galaxy S be located, locked, made to ring, or wiped remotely. It can track the phone every 15 minutes over 12 hours if GPS is available, auto-enable location settings when you start a search, and restrict outgoing calls on a locked device to a single user-defined number. Once you wipe, you lose Dive access until re-registration, so it’s very much a last-resort tool.
It’s a narrow feature set compared to later full cloud dashboards, but for the time it pushed phone-finder and remote wipe from corporate-only into mainstream consumer hardware.
So, Did the Galaxy S Deserve Its Hype?
Looking at the I9000 Galaxy S in isolation, it’s easy to see why reviewers called it the new leader of the Android pack. The display was legitimately best-in-class, the Hummingbird SoC edged out Snapdragon rivals, battery life was surprisingly good for the form factor, and TouchWiz 3.0 actually made Android more usable instead of just prettier.
But you also have to factor in the compromises: mediocre still photos, no flash, no shutter key, plastic that picked up smudges too easily, a weak loudspeaker, and some UI quirks. Competitors like the XPERIA X10, Nexus One, Desire and Motorola Milestone each fought back with their own strengths – better stills, earlier Froyo, a hardware keyboard – even if none matched the Galaxy S display.
The more honest verdict is this: the I9000 Galaxy S was the best early Android package for performance and media consumption, not a flawless superphone. If you cared about screen quality, video playback, and raw speed, it was the obvious choice. If camera performance or build quality were your top priorities, the story was a lot less clear-cut.
Check back soon as this story develops.