This is how you get an OS update on a Samsung phone.

[Bryf50]

Adreno 205 is fine for me, well beyond acceptable, given that I play no games that stress the GPU at all. I'm not sitting down on my phone to rock out on Q3. I have a nice desktop for FPS gaming.

I'll venture to guess that you're in the extreme minority when it comes to .flac. Glad that support is there for you out of the box. I'd estimate that 99% of users don't even know it's there.

I'm not going to trade blows over a UI overlay. In my opinion, they're both inferior to vanilla ROMs.

All hail Samsung! Best phone manufacturer EVAR! Is that what you need to hear from people? I jump on HTC handsets, because the dev community is generally large and very active on their devices.

See any Gingerbread ROMs here?

http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=721

How about here?

http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=758

Ignoring the April Fools Gingerbread, There's a gingerbread rom in active development on the first page.

The Fascinate isn't a far comparison, it's a crippled version of the SGS with less ram

Since when? All the Galaxy S phones have the same hardware with different radios. If your referring to only ~350MBs being shown usable in the OS, that's the same for all the Galaxy S phones. 128mb is reserved for the graphics, radio, etc.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Ignoring the April Fools Gingerbread, There's a gingerbread rom in active development on the first page.


Since when? All the Galaxy S phones have the same hardware with different radios. If your referring to only ~350MBs being shown usable in the OS, that's the same for all the Galaxy S phones. 128mb is reserved for the graphics, radio, etc.

I know all of the phones only show ~350mb available but I thought the Fascinate only had 340mb or so of ram total vs 512mb for all of the other versions.

 

[TheInternet1980]

However HTC has plenty of flaws of their own you just don't see people making a new thread every time they screw something up.

Enough people dev for HTC handsets, that most of what a user doesn't like about the device, can be changed, pretty much from release day forward. Big difference from Samsung devices.

 

[TheInternet1980]

Ignoring the April Fools Gingerbread, There's a gingerbread rom in active development on the first page.

"AS OF V5 THIS IS BASED ON CM7/Gingerbread!
V5:
Updated to CM7/Gingerbread framework
Updated to 2.6.32 kernel
fixed JIT
*A BUNCH OF PREVIOUSLY WORKING HARDWARE IS BROKEN AGAIN IN THIS BUILD!*"

Most HTC devices are on RC4 of CM7, with basically everything working. There isn't a comparison.

 

[Bryf50]

I know all of the phones only show ~350mb available but I thought the Fascinate only had 340mb or so of ram total vs 512mb for all of the other versions.

Nope, the confusion comes from verizon reporting 384mb's of ram for the fascinate for some reason. If you notice on Verizon's website they don't really report how much ram in in any of the new smartphones. If I had to guess is that there were a lot of complaints in the past with phones being listed with 512mb's of ram then people freaking out when they only see 350mb's available.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Enough people dev for HTC handsets, that most of what a user doesn't like about the device, can be changed, pretty much from release day forward. Big difference from Samsung devices.

Unless they don't like the hardware.

Personally I've found the Captivate to have plenty of community support.

Nope, the confusion comes from verizon reporting 384mb's of ram for the fascinate for some reason. If you notice on Verizon's website they don't really report how much ram in in any of the new smartphones. If I had to guess is that there were a lot of complaints in the past with phones being listed with 512mb's of ram then people freaking out when they only see 350mb's available.

Ok, that makes sense. I never really followed the Fascinate so I missed that.

 

[Bryf50]

Enough people dev for HTC handsets, that most of what a user doesn't like about the device, can be changed, pretty much from release day forward. Big difference from Samsung devices.

The Galaxy S dev community has been awesome. It upsets me to see someone bash them because some phones don't have perfect Gingerbread builds.

Also unlike other android phones, the phone itself is almost too easy to root and install new firmware. Literally all you have to do is hold the volume rocker while its booting and you enter download mode, letting you push any rom, kernel, modem, etc. to the phone. Once you do that you just install Clockwork and everything becomes even easier.

 

[TheInternet1980]

The Galaxy S dev community has been awesome. It upsets me to see someone bash them because some phones don't have perfect Gingerbread builds.

Unfortunately, that is a Samsung issue. Not a dev issue. Which is basically my point. I'm not one to bash anyone who puts time into dev'ing for the community.

 

[s44]

Most HTC devices are on RC4 of CM7, with basically everything working. There isn't a comparison.

Actually, you're looking at the *one* Galaxy S device that doesn't have fully functional CM7 on it. That's because Verizon sucks.

GSM models have multiple Gingerbread options. (CM7, MIUI, and -- for i9000 and Vibrant -- Touchwiz.)

 

[TheInternet1980]

My bad. Wasn't trying to cherry pick. XDA is slow as balls today, which makes looking at the forums a giant pain in the ass.

 

[s44]

Yeah, the site needs a serious server upgrade.

 

[YoungGun21]

Waiting for OTA's? On an android device? Why?

The problem isn't waiting on an OTA. It is waiting for source from Samsung. The Devs are piecing together everything they can, with what we are given (mainly stuff from Mesmerize), to get a full Froyo/AOSP/Gingerbread rom working. The biggest problem is that we don't have the kernel source for our phone from Samsung. Once the .32 kernel is given, we will obviously have full Froyo, and should have working GB (I've been told that other phones got it running off of the Froyo kernel).

Until then, it is what it is. Not like 2.3 really brings any huge advancements.

 

[Bryf50]

The problem isn't waiting on an OTA. It is waiting for source from Samsung. The Devs are piecing together everything they can, with what we are given (mainly stuff from Mesmerize), to get a full Froyo/AOSP/Gingerbread rom working. The biggest problem is that we don't have the kernel source for our phone from Samsung. Once the .32 kernel is given, we will obviously have full Froyo, and should have working GB (I've been told that other phones got it running off of the Froyo kernel).

Until then, it is what it is. Not like 2.3 really brings any huge advancements.

We got the source code for the froyo kernel a few day ago. Officially it's for the Mesmerize but its directly compatible with the fascinate. A pretty good AOSP froyo rom from jt has been available for some time now. If you really want to be up to date with the dev stuff there's an irc channel that all the devs use that's always interesting.

 

[TheInternet1980]

We got the source code for the froyo kernel a few day ago.

This is people's issue with Samsung. Froyo kernel? A few days ago? That's honestly pathetic. I'm glad you guys have devs to piece together ROMs from here and there...otherwise, you'd be stuck with 2.1? Fail.

 

[Bryf50]

This is people's issue with Samsung. Froyo kernel? A few days ago? That's honestly pathetic. I'm glad you guys have devs to piece together ROMs from here and there...otherwise, you'd be stuck with 2.1? Fail.

Well we had the kernel for months now. Now we have the source code.

 

[YoungGun21]

We got the source code for the froyo kernel a few day ago. Officially it's for the Mesmerize but its directly compatible with the fascinate. A pretty good AOSP froyo rom from jt has been available for some time now. If you really want to be up to date with the dev stuff there's an irc channel that all the devs use that's always interesting.

We didn't get our source. That is the Mesmerize's souce. It helps, yes. And now we can have custom kernels. But it isn't quite enough to get 2.3 working from what I understand. Not everything is compatible from EC10.

 

[s44]

We didn't get our source. That is the Mesmerize's souce. It helps, yes. And now we can have custom kernels. But it isn't quite enough to get 2.3 working from what I understand. Not everything is compatible from EC10.

No, you're misunderstanding the issue.

The Fascinate and Mesmerize (and Showcase) are literally identical hardware. The difference is in (1) carrier settings in the modem.bin, and (2) slightly altered partition structure (I think, but not sure why on this one). But any kernel is totally identical, and the ROMs will again only have issues on carrier-protocol specific stuff.

This means that Mesmerize EC10 source *is* perfect Touchwiz Froyo source.

2.3 is another issue. Because Samsung has never released an AOSP kernel for the Galaxy S or AOSP-compatible hardware drivers, the CMSGS folks (coolya, codeworkx, et al.) had to cobble one together from a combination of Nexus S code and driver bits from all over (including some really odd places). They finished this, so going forward kernels for new AOSP revisions (Honeycomb on the Galaxy Tab, Ice Cream when it releases, etc.) will be *much* easier. And with the AOSP kernel you see both CM7 and Gingerbread MIUI running on other Galaxy S devices.

*However*, the Fascinate has two further issues. First, while the Nexus S and i9000 are both GSM, the Fascinate is CDMA. This means a rewrite of the RIL (radio interface layer) is necessary. This is a big project, though largely I believe complete. Second, apparently the i500 Fascinate/Mesmerize/Showcase actually has different sensors than the other Galaxy S models. This has caused a further delay to re-adapt appropriate sensor hardware drivers, though this isn't as big an issue.

The RIL thing is going to hold up AOSP on the Thunderbolt, as well (ironically, there are a lot of Fascinate devs working on this). The rest of the hardware is pretty easy to dev -- the advantage of HTC reusing hardware is that the drivers are well known -- but there isn't an AOSP phone with LTE, which means pain and probably a delay before a true AOSP/CM7 kernel appears.

 

[mammador]

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/31/samsung-galaxy-s-rumored-to-be-getting-a-1-4ghz-2011-edition-n/



You buy a new one.

What about Samsung Kies?