Steve Wozniak was also at the Apple Special Event in the audience and Steve asked his old friend to take a stand whilst everyone applauded.

Apple Stores

• Apple have been opening some great stores lately, recently opened store in Paris.
• Apple also really excited about our 2nd store in China in Shanghai, 40ft high glass cylinder, fanstastic store
• In London we opened another store in Covent Garden (2nd really large store in London), beautiful old building we restored
• Apple now have 300 Apple Retail Stores (Covent Garden, London was the 300th store), now in 10 countries
• Apple opening first Apple store in Spain shortly, that makes 11 countries
• 1 million visitors some days (one to one = 80,000 / week), 50% buying their first Mac

iOS

• iOS powers our mobile devices, revolution in both touch and apps, 120 million iOS devices now shipped!
• 230,000 new activations a day, iOS appstore over 6.5 Billion apps, 200 apps downloaded every second
• Today Apple are releasing iOS 4.1, bugs fixed – Proximity, Bluetooth, iPhone 3G
• Secondly Apple have added HDR photos to iOS 4.1, standard in iOS 4.1.
• Ability to upload HDR videos over WiFi, TV show rentals
• HDR photo taking will take 3x photos on iPhone 4.1 and bracket to provide a higher contrast more realistic photo
• Game Center also built into iOS 4.1, it’s a game center right on the phone with multiplayer games with API’s
• Challenge your friends or have your friends challenge you with iOS 4.1 Game Center
• Today Project Sword announced (action packed RPG) aka Unreal engine but gorgeous 3D world from Epic Games
• The Project Sword RPG from #epicgames looks awesome with really fast FPS rate iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad release autumn
• iOS 4.1 available next week for iPhone and iPod Touch (free download via iTunes)
• Sneak peak at iOS 4.2 release (a little later this year) – all about iPad
• iOS 4.2 bringing everything to iPad, HDR photos, Game Center, multitasking wireless printing, EVERYTHING brought to iPad!
• iOS 4.2 also adding AirPlay to iPad
• AirTunes – streaming music over WiFi to an Airport Express base station to your mobile device.
• Apple changing name from AirTunes to AirPlay – streaming music, photos and videos!
• iPad 4.2 coming out in November – Will be a free update for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. So no iOS 4.1 yet for iPad

iPods

• Apple have sold 275 million iPods sold
• All new design for every single model of iPod!!!
• iPod Shuffle – now comes with buttons and voice over play lists and smaller than 2nd generation
• iPod Shuffle – Small and wearable, easy to use with buttons, speak playlists, Genius mixes, voiceover, 15 hours of music
• iPod Shuffle – Packing small and looks really cute, comes in 5 colours and sells for $49
• New iPod Nano – smaller, removed click wheel and now it’s touch based with multitouch! 46% smaller, 24hrs music playback
• New iPod Nano – has built-in clock, size of your watch face, could be used as a music player watch with an armband
• New iPod Nano – comes in 6x colours, $149 = 8gb, $179 = 16gb available for holiday season
• iPod Touch – 1.5 Billion games and entertainment titles already downloaded to iPod Touch
• New iPod Touch – Thinner still, amazing RETINA display, 4x pixels 326 ppi, 24-bit colour LED backlit, best display
• New iPod Touch – Apple A4 chip included, 3-axis Gyro, iOS 4.1 with Game Center, Facetime (WiFi) with Front facing camera
• New iPod Touch – Rear camera added aswell with HD video recording! 40 hours of music playback!
• New iPod Touch – Pricing – 8gb = $229, 32gb = $299. 64gb = $399, iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, iPod Touch shipping next week
• New iPod Touch – Pre-order available for iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano and iPod Touch later today
• Steve Jobs showing new video adverts for the new iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano and iPod Touch

iTunes

• iTunes 11.7 Billion songs, 450 Million TV episodes downloaded
• New logo for iTunes 10 (musical note in a blue background in a circle)
• iTunes 10 – New feature – Ping (Social network meets iTunes) – it’s not Facebook, not Twitter, Social Network about music
• iTunes 10 – Ping – follow your favourite artist and what your friends are listening to, all built into iTunes 10
• iTunes 10 – Social Media meets iTunes, basically Twitter for iTunes to find out about the latest songs and artists
• iTunes 10 – Ping (Social Network for iTunes) is open to 160 million iTunes users in 23 countries IMMEDIATELY
• iTunes 10 – no mention of wirelessly syncing iPod, iPhone and iPad yet to iTunes
• iTunes 10 – Ping dubbed the first Social Network all about music by Steve Jobs
• iTunes 10 – Ping (Social Network for Music) is also available on your iPhone and iPod Touch (right in the iTunes store)
• iTunes 10 – Available today for 160 million people in 23 countries, download to start today at apple.com
• iTunes 10 not quite yet available, will be available later today after keynote

Apple TV

• Apple TV 2nd generation is a quarter of the size of the 1st generation Apple TV! Steve holds in palm of his hand, so tiny
• Apple TV – PSU built in, 1x HDMI connector and 1x Ethernet, built-in WiFi 802.11n, really simple, plug in and go
• New Apple TV – About music, TV shows and streaming, all about HD when available, no purchases available, you rent shows
• New Apple TV – No storage problem, you rent them, it streams them over the air, still cheaper than if you bought it
• New Apple TV – You can stream music, photos, videos from your computer to Apple TV
• New Apple TV – Silent, cool and tiny, no storage required. Rent $4.99 First run HD movies when come out on DVD
• New Apple TV – First run HD movies $4.99 but get cheaper over time
• New Apple TV – To rent HD TV Shows, 99 cents for Apple TV, some are commercially free
• New Apple TV – ABC and Fox offering shows for 99 cents for rental on Apple TV
• New Apple TV – Hollywood (Netflix customers) can stream from Netflix library to Apple TV, YouTube support, Flickr
• New Apple TV – No need to sync to iTunes to a PC or Mac, just plug and go
• New Apple TV – To rent a TV show, click the $0.99 button, bang you’re now watching it whilst streaming to Apple TV
• New Apple TV – $99!!!! Available later this month (about 4 weeks, pre-order today)

Steve Jobs also managed to get Chris Martin from Coldplay to play the piano and sing live with various Coldplay songs.  Unfortunately the rest of the band couldn’t make it – Chris said they were just too lazy to attend

The worst part I would have to say about the Samsung Galaxy S for me is the GPS is virtually non-existent. I have only ever seen one device marginally near as worse, and that was the iPhone 3G in the early days, but unfortunately the Samsung Galaxy S is significantly worse, and here’s why…

In 10x 1 hour drives, I have only had a GPS fix where GPS applications could reliably track where I am on the road and provide voice navigation guidance for me. Out of that 1 hour, I would have to say that a good 20 minutes of that guidance put me in side streets or streets up to a mile away.

I used a variety of navigation applications including Navigon, TomTom, Ndrive so no one application was at fault, and all they do is ask the GPS chip through the Android java layer “where am I” so really can’t be faulted. Due to the lack luster GPS performance I decided to try geolocation applications like GoWalla and Foursquare and likewise a good 50% of the time these showed me being >1 mile away from where I was, and in some cases over 10 miles away! Great if you want to check into some more places you haven’t visited, but useless to check in to locals places. Trying Google Maps likewise saw the same distances. If you disable getting a GPS fix over wifi then you wont get a GPS fix. If you have this enabled then it seems to preference wifi GPS positioning more and place you way off from your current location. Speaking to other users of the Samsung Galaxy S they seem to be experiencing similar problems. Sometimes it works and seems to work pretty well, when it does you’re very lucky. When it doesn’t work well you are left high and dry with no GPS.

I have tried applications that use both the standard Java framework and also the newer NMEA stream in Android OS 2.1 but alas, the GPS inside the Samsung Galaxy S is just too poor quality to have it be anymore accurate. Samsung are already aware of this as you will see in the below tweet.

 
 

Samsung have an update scheduled worldwide for September to help reduce the poor performance of the GPS the Samsung Galaxy S but whether it can resolve the performance issue fully we wont know until it arrives. If it’s clearly a software issue the it might be possible to resolve it in a ROM update. However, if it’s a physical hardware problem (which I’m starting to wonder about) then it won’t be fully fixable. The reason why I’m wondering about a hardware flaw is this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen this problem arise in devices with GPS chips and antennas. What could be happening is that the GPS chip is too close to maybe the processor or other parts of the system board that are generating adverse RF interference, enough to splatter the circuit board and GPS antenna to degrade the quality of the GPS signal it thinks it is receiving and creating a lack luster GPS performance problem.

With over 1 million units allegedly sold in the USA already in a month and worldwide sales on the increase, you have to wonder whether Samsung knew about this problem prior to release. Was enough QA performed prior to releasing the device to market, or did they chuck the device out because they thought it was near perfect in the hope to get sales and fix it in the field?

One thing for sure is that if you want to buy a new mobile phone and want to use it for GPS, whether it’s satellite navigation, geotagging photos or location based services, you should seriously consider holding off until its seen that the Samsung Galaxy S problems are fixed. The Samsung Galaxy S is a great device, but with the slow performance issues dogging the device along with the GPS problems that have also been reported on Engadget, this really hampers the device as a good iPhone killer.

As far as we know, this also affects the Samsung Galaxy S other brother and sisters which are just a name rebranding of the Samsung Galaxy S:-

UPDATE #1 – Other sites reporting GPS problems:-

The Samsung Galaxy S is a great device, but there’s one big problem with it. Although it has a fast 1Ghz process and 512mb Ram, it runs slow. It keep stalling and freezing and feels overly sluggish. It’s a real shame because it’s a great device and a great Android experience. Don’t feel cheated though because there is an easy way of fixing the sluggishness of the device and getting it to run blazingly fast.

Why is the device sluggish?
The Samsung Galaxy S has 8gb or 16gb flash. On the main system parition where apps are installed, Samsung in their infinite wisdom decided to create the main system partition with a partition type as RFS. This is rather slow, and what happens whenever any application tries to read files from disk or write them, you get a performance lag.

How can I resolve the lag and improve system speed?
First you have to root the device. I know a lot of people won’t want to root the device, but it’s a very painless and free and easy thing to do. Once you’ve rooted your device, you can then run a patch that needs root access to the device. What this patch does is take the 2gb of application partition space and create a new 1gb partition within the 2gb partition. Once it’s done this, it creates it as a proper EXT2 partition. Then once the partition is created and formatted, it then moves all your apps out of the main 2gb partition and places it within the smaller 1gb partition. This allows the Galaxy S to then run blindingly fast. The downside is that the original 2gb you had for apps to be installed is now reduced to 1gb. However, don’t worry about this. 1gb is way too much space than you’ll ever need for apps to install. Most Android devices that run off SD card only have around 128mb of user application space, so don’t worry about this. You won’t be limited in what you can install.

Surely though you’re going to run out of space?
No, since rooting and applying the One Click Lag Fix I have 28 apps/games installed, 53 widgets on top of the 8 Samsung Widgets and I still have 626mb free for apps to be installed. You can see the image to the right that shows 626mb free on my device.

Okay, I’m in, I love the Samsung Galaxy S but I need to speed it up, what do I do to speed it up?

1. Root your device – here
2. Apply One Click Lag Fix – here

The way I did it was to follow the instructions here and root the device first, then download and apply the One Click Lag Fix manually.

However, there’s now an easier way, you can download an APK to do it all for you. You can download it from here.

What if I don’t want it in future?
Well there’s a restore option to allow you to go back. However, you probably won’t want to.

Do I still need to stay rooted?
Not once you have applied the One Click Lag Fix, but most people stay rooted to gain access to other apps, like the ability to take screenshots.

So how fast has it speeded up?
This is a common question people are asking me. I’d say it’s difficult to really tell for sure in terms of real life usability but I suspect it’s in the region of around 3x faster.

The reason why I say it’s difficult to tell is, could you really tell if any device was running 2x, 3x or 4x faster? It’s a personal thing, unless you’re going to sit there and do a whole load of benchmarking and time every single entity.

In real life usage the device when it used to be fast is as fast as it was so you’re not going to see any speedup there, because it’s not overclocking the processor in any way. The beauty is you don’t now see the slow downs that much, so reality wise it’s probably the equivalent of 2-3 times faster.

If you run Quadrant which is a benchmarking tool you’ll see the Samsung Galaxy S usually runs at around 800 (which is what I was seeing prior to rooting and applying the One Click Lag Fix), but now since applying this the device is running at 2261. So Quadrant is showing the device from a performance perspective is running at 2.83 times faster than it was prior to applying the One Click Lag Fix.

Hopefully that should give you the benchmark data you need to determine whether you want to risk applying the root and One Click Lag Fix. Obviously with all kind of patches like this, there’s a risk that you could brick your phone but very few people on the forums have done this from what I can see.

One thing I should note is you will still see some pauses/slow downs now and again. This typically is when you have too many apps open or they’re reading/writing to the file system, that’s only normal with any device, so if you notice a slow down, use an App Killer program like Advanced Task Killer that’s free in the Google Market Place, this will then kill any of your other apps you choose to kill and your device will speed up again. That’s nothing to do with applying the One Click Lag Fix, it’s just an Android thing. Android doesn’t close apps you open unlike iPhone where it does.

3x drop tests, that looks like it beat the iPhone 4. Could be due to the lighter weight it carries in the device. The video is unfortunately not in English so you might want to turn your speakers down.

I looked at a number of products that didn’t really fit the bill until I found Google Listen. Google Listen is a free product for the Android platform and works well under Android OS 2.1 and 2.2 but I believe it works on earlier versions of the OS.

With Google Listen you can subscribe to known podcasts on the internet and also add your own podcasts if you have an RSS feed to pick from.

Once you’ve chosen an existing podcast / subscription or entered your own RSS feed, it then appears with album cover art for the podcast. Once you have this, it will start downloading the latest versions of the podcast as soon as it’s ready.

You have features that allow you to continue on from a podcast that you stopped, even if the app was closed, or the device was power cycled which is a great feature. You also have the protection to only download new podcast episodes over WiFi if you want. Bearing in mind that most podcast episodes can be anything from 10mb up to 100mb depending on the length and audio quality and encoding.

I’m really liking Google Listen, the only thing I haven’t found yet a way to overcome is to only play one episode. Sometimes I like to start to listen to an episode and fall asleep and in this case it starts playing all other episodes until I stop it.

It lead me to think about the complete SmartPhone series, currently the iPhone and Android phones are now dubbed the SmartPhone and the older style phones that didn’t have app installs or widgets are now classed as ‘feature phones’. The Orange C600 was a phone that straddled between both categories it had app support but it wasn’t a touch screen device.

It seems that the non-touch screen devices are on the way out, not many manufacturers make them now. All new devices are touch-screen devices, and most now don’t even sport a hardware keyboard. It’s kind of interesting being in the Tech World and seeing how things evolve year from year. It was only 4-5 years ago that phones like the Orange C600 were the in-phone, now it’s just a blast from the past relegated to the phone graveyard in the sky.

The Orange C600 was great because it was a Windows Mobile device, you could install Windows Mobile (non-touch-screen) apps to it, it operated as a very good phone and synced your contacts natively from Outlook using ActiveSync. It was clean, simple and workable. How things have moved on…..

Below is the iPhone home screens, you can see how symmetric the iPhone UI is, every icon is in it’s own place holder, 4×4 layout plus the bottom 4 icons that remain consistent across all screens. It’s a very clean interface and most iPhone users like this, but it can sometimes become rather too rigid in it’s design.

Here are the Android home screens from the Samsung Galaxy S running Android OS 2.1 (Eclair). You can immediately see the difference, although you still have the ability like the iPhone to do a 4×4 layout with 4 buttons that are consistent at the base o the screen, you also have widget control, so you can add any widget application that takes up a space on the desktop home screens. You can add all kinds of widgets like Twitter status update applets, Facebook status updates, clocks, weather and much more. You can also add other features like ability to turn off Bluetooth, GPS , WiFi etc which is a very nice feature to have as a quick launch button to take you into settings.

I like the cleanness of the iPhone, but I also like the customisations you can make on the Android platform. Ultimately it’s good to put the control in the users hands, so if I want the clean looking iPhone display on an Android, I can do it. On the iPhone if I want an unclean look and want some widget support, I can’t unless I jailbreak it which of course is frowned upon by Apple and invalidates your warranty.

The Samsung Galaxy S is the latest Android phone to hit the market, it has a Super AMOLED which is built into the glass of the device rather than being placed as a layer on top of the glass like in all other smartphones.

Samsung have pulled out all the stops, well most of the stops, read on to find out why it’s not as good as I first thought.

Bluetooth Call Setup – In-Car
The Bluetooth stack on the Samsung Galaxy S is implemented poorly. Well, I can’t really say whether it’s a Samsung that implemented it poorly or whether it’s an Android thing, but taking the device in-car and pairing it with my Bluetooth speaker, whenever I make calls or am called, or call my voice mail all I get is static on the call. Nothing seems to stop it, whether it’s charging or not, whether it’s on the dashboard or on the seat. This really for me puts a downer on the Galaxy S because I spend 4 hours a day on phone calls and conference calls and I don’t like to have it placed up to my ear all the time.

Loudspeaker
When not in car I use loud speaker on calls by usually connecting my iPhone via a 3.5mm cable to my Linx B-Tube as I spend a lot of hours per week on conference calls. Unfortunately although the Samsung Galaxy S has a 3.5mm headphone socket and although you can play your music or any audio out through this to any speaker including the Linx B-Tube, as soon as a call connects, the audio won’t go through the 3.5mm cable UNLESS you use Samsung’s own headset that you get in the box.

This is very frustrating, Samsung seem to have done this because they’ve doubled the 3.5mm socket as a video out to TV. Crippling the audio-out on a device in favour of video-out is a bad thing to do. Samsung if you really wanted to do video-out via a 3.5mm socket then you should have added another socket to the phone.

Interface / UI
The interface on the Samsung Galaxy S is a great interface. The first thing you’ll see is the swipe to unlock. Not a new feature by any definition, however they use the screen as a piece of glass which is new, and you drag the dimmed glass tile in any direction to unlock and this is a very new feature.

You can turn on an unlock password screen, which is very new because here you don’t enter a password or a pin but you have dots on screen and you have to connect dots in a certain way to unlock the phone.

On the Samsung Galaxy S you have 7x home screens so you have enough for all your icons and widgets. Samsung provide some of their own widgets and applications. Unfortunately although some of them have some good use, just like the HTC custom widgets they tend to be on the large and bulky side and take up most of the screen.

The great thing that I haven’t seen on other Android devices is the ability to use Folders. This is a feature on the Samsung Galaxy S and allows you to either drag app icons into folders or to drag contacts into folders. This is a great addition and removes the clutter on most of the home screens and allows for more widgets.

One thing I find really slow is adding app shortcuts to the desktop, sometimes the device takes a good 20 seconds before you get a list of shortcuts available for applications. I’m not sure why this is but this is the only sluggish part of the device I find. This seems to happen when it has detected new apps are installed/removed and it seems to recatalog every app again but doesn’t tell you that it’s doing it.

Speed of device
I’m really liking the speed of the device, it’s fast with the Android 2.1 OS and although I’d prefer to have Froyo 2.2, I’m prepared to wait for the official Samsung update to appear later in the month. That said I started to see a lot of common freezing occurring on the device after posting a You Tube video I found out that Samsung have formatted the underlying partition wrongly. After having to ROOT the device and apply a patch, the device is running very much faster, in-fact EXTREMELY fast. No freezes in most of the apps now, just the occasional freeze here or there.

Multitasking
The Samsung Galaxy S like all Android devices comes with TRUE multitasking unlike the multislicing that iPhone’s have on iOS4. To be completely honest I haven’t really seen the need for multitasking, its good your apps remain open but this can also create a hindrance because I noticed the device slowing down and regularly freezing the UI completely. Once I killed most of the tasks with a free task killer (Advanced Task Killer) the device seemed to speed up and not freeze as much. I’m sure this is the main reason why Apple haven’t enabled full multitasking on the iPhone. The big thing for me is that the Samsung Galaxy S even with a 1500mAh battery still doesn’t last as long as the iPhone unless I turn off Bluetooth and WiFi, but the iPhone have these enabled.

Social Media
I’m a heavy Facebook, Twitter and Gowalla user and this is an area I knew I would be safe from using the HTC Desire. Android has a great selection of apps for Twitter, the best on Twitter by far is Seesmic. On the iPhone and iPad I would usually use Tweetings, I’ve found this to be the best all round Twitter app and is slightly better than Seesmic. There’s still no Tweetings on Android so Seesmic although great will have to do for the time being. I also have the official updated Facebook app installed which is great. I use Focus for Facebook on the iPhone because this removes app spam and does message threading and this isn’t on Android still. Gowalla I’m happy with as Gowalla have their own Android app and this works as well as the iPhone version.

Email
Email works great whether you’re a Gmail user or using Microsoft Exchange. The only thing I don’t like is there black interface. I’d rather they use common colours. I get the feeling they aimed the look and feel at a teenager in some of their colourings.

Podcasting
I listen to a lot of podcasts / netcasts and I have 3x JBL speaker docks, one in my office, one in the bedroom and one in the lounge, so whenever I want to listen to a podcast I simply would dock my iPhone and listen to it on the loud speaker. I can do the same with the Android but I need to connect it up to a 3.5mm speaker cable and I can’t charge it in the dock. This obviously is what is expected as the JBL speaker is an iPhone dock speaker. I can get away with using the 3.5mm connection. I’ve started using Google Listen and finding this works really well for podcasts, just doesn’t do videos. However, Dpod does and I also have that installed now.

Blogging
I’m not a heavy blogger but I do blog to my website a lot. I do most of this via the iPad but occasionally there are things I want to blog when I don’t have my iPad with me. Having the WordPress application and WPStats accessible on the Samsung Galaxy S is a great addition and although I’m used to WordPress on the iPhone I don’t have WPStats which is a great app to check my daily stats.

Productivity
I use Dropbox a lot because I save files on my PC and will access them either on my iPad or on my iPhone / Samsung Galaxy S. Dropbox have their own official app although I’m using the unofficial app at the moment on Android and this works really well. I also use F1 Racing for all my F1 fix that I need.

I have a number of news apps that I run on a regular basis like Engadget, Mashable, BBC News and Sky News. These all work extremely well, I need to find a good RSS reader that hooks into Google Reader. I usually use NetNewsWire on the iPhone which I really like but there’s no version available on Android.

Games
I haven’t installed many games yet on the Galaxy S, but all the regular Android ones that I have installed seem to work. Samsung do give you Asphalt5 (driving game) for free which is a very nice tough and shows off just how fast the device is (well after you root/jailbreak)

GPS
GPS works, but it’s worse than the iPhone, and there’s always been a lot of complaints about the iPhone GPS. For a more in-depth look you can read Samsung Galaxy S GPS problems post.

Limitations / Shortcomings

 
Overall
I’m really liking the Samsung Galaxy S, to be completely honest I could probably have moved completely to Android with the HTC Desire. The problem with the HTC Desire like most devices is they are severely capped / limited on how much program install memory they have available, usually this is around 512mb or lower, so you completely fill up the device with about 20 apps installed. With the Samsung Galaxy S like the Incredible and other devices has an internal flash memory, I have 8gb on the Samsung Galaxy S with a further 32gb on microSD and this gives me almost an unlimited space to install apps. Unfortunately without Froyo 2.2 to be able to install apps on SD card, and also most developers not supporting this feature yet including Google, the 8gb flash storage comes in really handy.

I’ve almost completely converted to the Samsung Galaxy S, and I’m really torn now on which phone to use. I love the iPhone and it works out well because if I purchase an app on the iPad I almost always have it then installed for free on the iPhone. For the Samsung Galaxy S I need to repurchase apps as they’re not transferrable between platforms and for the most part you have to go for different programs on each platform, so that creates another learning experience. That said, the app support is really good and new Android apps are increasing in frequency which means there’s less holes to fill.

I like the iPhone but I also like the Samsung Galaxy S. For me the real annoyance is the 3.5mm jack, although that said, the external speaker on the Samsung Galaxy S is the loudest I have ever heard and I can do without using my Linx B-Tube as a conference call speaker. I have received some complaints that if I’m on external speaker and talk that people say they can hear echos or the audio breaks up a little which I didn’t have on the iPhone using the Linx B-Tube.

The other annoyances are the Bluetooth stack providing a lot of static over Bluetooth speakers/headphones and also the GPS, which kind of takes away from all the good the Samsung Galaxy S is doing and reduces it to a lack luster device.

Is it an iPhone killer? Simply put YES if you can get around the shortcomings of the device.

For now I’m still going to continue using the Samsung Galaxy S as my main phone and see how much longer I can continue using it with the above limitations instead of the iPhone.

The Samsung Galaxy S is also known as

Engadget says…
You MUST use WiFi to get a GPS fix
“Use wireless networks” is now turned off by default, but even with it on, the phone may be slow or unable to determine even a rough location. Originally, we’d believed this was the only problem. Samsung tells us that it’s a new Google mandate that Android devices be shipped with the “use wireless networks” option disabled, which means you’re relying on traditional GPS alone to determine your location — a lost cause indoors, in urban canyons, or under dense tree cover. Indeed, we discovered it was turned off on our Captivate, Vibrant, and Epic 4G after fresh hard resets, and there’s no indication to the user that it’s probably in their best interest to enable it; we’re accustomed to being presented with the option during account setup on other Android devices, but it doesn’t happen here. After enabling it from settings, we found that both the Captivate and Epic 4G were able to get our location with 1,000 to 1,500-meter accuracy practically immediately in Google Maps, though the Vibrant still never came through; it had the weakest signal of the three, which may have accounted for that (though it never dropped the signal altogether).

GPS in the Samsung Galaxy S range just aren’t doing their job.
Cell tower triangulation and WiFi location database services like Skyhook only take you so far — at the end of the day, you still need to tune in to the birds a few thousand miles up to figure out precisely where you are. All Galaxy S models seem to be having trouble turning GPS reception into coordinates, even when the phone is able to see four or more satellites in view (four is the minimum you normally need for a precise, three-dimensional lock). In some cases, resetting the phone apparently helps, but it ceases to work again after a day or two of use. To our knowledge, none of the homebrew fixes out there have been able to solve this part of the problem perfectly and permanently. The Captivate and Vibrant are both affected by this one; we’re not sure on the Epic, but we’re working to nail it down.

Phones affected are:-

The phone is a little taller and a small amount wider than the iPhone 3GS but not a lot. It does look very similar to an iPhone 3GS in many ways.

The AMOLED screen is very bright and clear and vivid and although it won’t match the retina display on the iPhone 4 it does better the iPhone 3GS screen by quite a bit.

Apple decided not to implement multitasking but multislicing for a good reason, it can kill a device. You’ll see from this video that all I’m running is Google Listen podcast player and listening to a podcast and trying to use Greader and the device just keeps freezing. I’m seeing this across the entire device when I’m using multitasking. The Samsung Galaxy S is running Android 2.1 OS but I doubt when the 2.2 Froyo is deployed that this will help in anyway resolve the multitasking freezes I’m seeing.

Youtube link as Embedding seems to be broken at the moment with YouTube new videos.

I’m really hoping that Google leave it in the current location for Froyo 2.2 and they don’t change this again when going to Gingerbread 3.0

Android OS 1.6 (Donut)
1. Select SETTINGS from the main program screen menu where app icons are
2. Select SPEECH SYNTHESIS
3. If INSTALL VOICE DATA is greyed out then it means TTS is installed
4. Under ALWAYS USE MY SETTINGS the TICK will be greyed out. They must tick it to have the tick go GREEN

Android OS 2.0 / 2.1 (Eclair)
1. Select SETTINGS from the main program screen menu where app icons are
2. Select TEXT-TO-SPEECH
3. If INSTALL VOICE DATA is greyed out then it means TTS is installed
4. Under ALWAYS USE MY SETTINGS the TICK will be greyed out. They must tick it to have the tick go GREEN

Android OS 2.2 (Froyo)
1. Select SETTINGS from the main program screen menu where app icons are
2. Select VOICE INPUT & OUTPUT
3. Select TEXT-TO-SPEECH SETTINGS
4. If INSTALL VOICE DATA is greyed out then it means TTS is installed
5. Under ALWAYS USE MY SETTINGS the TICK will be greyed out. They must tick it to have the tick go GREEN