I can’t believe… TEN million units sold already. The Samsung Galaxy S series has only been out 7 months! Well, actually I can believe it. It really is no surprise as Samsung did state early on that this was their goal.
10 million phones in under 7 months = more than 142 thousand phones per month.
142k / 32 = more than 4400 phones per day
4400 / 24 = more than 18 phones per hour
So that means on ON AVERAGE Samsung has been selling three Galaxy S phones every 10 minutes since it launched! VERY Impressive Samsung. Great Success!!!
AndroidGalaxy.NET would like to welcome all 10 million users to the exclusive and exciting Galaxy S ownership experience. It is a great club to be in.
Source: Engadget
Happy New Year Everyone!!!
AndroidGalaxy.NET wishes each and every one of our loyal readers A fascinating, captivating, vibrant and prosperous New Year!!!
I would like to wish you the very best in your personal and professional endeavours.
Samsung Galaxy S fans have are in for a lot of excitement in 2011.
It is going to be another epic year for leading-edge Android smartphones.
First off, we know a significant portion of existing Galaxy S owners who still haven’t got Froyo on their handsets.
If you are in that category, you have a lot to look forward to. Most remaining owners should be getting official Android 2.2. updates to their phones in the first few weeks of the new year.
The excitement doesn’t stop there, as Google has already released Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
For the readers out there that have already taken the plunge with custom ROMS, you can be sure that stable Gingerbread ROMS are right around the corner.
I have not tried a full gingerbread ROM yet, but I suspect within the next month or so, there will be very tasty (fully functional) Gingerbread ROMS for you.
I don’t think the difference from Froyo to Gingerbread is going to be as much as the jump from Eclair to Froyo, but I still expect it is going to be very satisfying to have Gingerbread on the Galaxy S hardware.
Lastly, for our readers that have not picked up a Galaxy S handset yet, or are already eager to upgrade further, here are my predictions of what we can likely expect.
I think by mid-2011, Samsung will have started rolling out the next generation of Galaxy S phones, and these are the
specs we might see:
1. 4.5″ Super AMOLED 2 screens
2. Dual Core processors. (Tegra 2 from NVidia!)
3. 1 Gigabyte of RAM
4. 1080P video recording
5. Near Field Communication (NFC) chips.
6. Resolution better than 800 X 480
7. Faster cell phone networks.
I’m not entirely sure about #6 – I think we are definitely due for higher resolution and pixel density, and I would love to see 1280 X 720.
We also don’t know what many of the real world benefits NFC will provide. We do know we are headed towards being able to make payments with our mobile phones (as is already popular in markets like Japan) but wide-spread adoption around the world will take time.
What we do know for sure is Honeycomb and Ice Cream versions of Android are on their way, as are significantly better hardware.
I am confident this means 2011 is going to be an EXCITING and important year in the evolution of Android Smartphones.
What are your Android predictions for 2011???
Happy New Year once again and stay tuned for LOTS and LOTS of Android Videos from AGN
- Vinay Menon
A big advantage of running a custom ROM on your Samsung Galaxy S is that ROM developers come out with updates MUCH more often than official updates from Samsung or your cellular provider. This is a HUGE benefit as you get to have the latest software on your phone sometimes even hours after it is released. That’s markedly different from official updates, which can come 6 months later.
A good example of this can be seen with Samsung’s Froyo updates. Google released Android 2.2 Froyo at the end of May. Here we are 7 months later at the end of December, and in many markets 2.2 has just started to roll-out, or has not even been released yet. In the meantime Google has already released Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
That means all the 2.1 Eclair users out there are now running an operating system that is 2 versions old!!
Run a custom ROM on your phone however, and you get the newest software immediately. Darky’s ROM is currently based on the newest Froyo 2.2.1 firmware.
I would expect within a month we will start to see versions based on Gingerbread. Imagine how well that’s going to run on the Galaxy S. You are in essence going to have the Nexus S experience.
Darky’s Version 6.0 ROM was based on Froyo JPX firmware. 2 days ago Darky released Version 7.0 of his popular ROM, based on the newer JPY firmware.
Once you already have a custom ROM installed, upgrading to a newer version of that ROM is a Piece of Cake. All you do is save the file, restart the phone, and click on the file. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
Just follow these 3 simple steps:
1. Download and copy the ROM to your internal SD card.
2. Reboot into ClockWorkMod Recovery (easy to do with the phone shut-down menu.)
3. Click on the ROM zip file to flash it, and then reboot the phone.
That’s it. A very simple upgrade process, and in most cases you can keep all your user data, settings, and apps.
If you want to start with a clean slate, you can easily do a full wipe from the recovery menu before you flash the new ROM.
In the video below I do a full delete of all data, and then upgrade to the newer version 7.0 ROM:
For those of you with stock phones still running Eclair on Christmas Day 2010, I have made a video of how to flash Darky’s ROM – a popular custom ROM for the Samsung Galaxy S GT-i9000.
The difference it made to the phone is ridiculous.
Going from stock Samsung 2.1 to a nicely tuned and optimized Froyo ROM completely transforms the phone. To begin with the phone is MUCH faster and far more responsive. Graphical tweaks mean everything looks much nicer. Froyo is far more user-friendly, with better designed menus and UI elements. You get to enjoy the latest versions of Google’s main applications like GMail, Maps, and Youtube. The crapware installed by carriers is removed. And several more useful apps often come pre-installed.
If you would like to upgrade the operating system on your Galaxy S, make sure your phone is Rooted first, and then follow these 3 simple steps:
1. Download two zip files and copy them to the phone’s internal SD card. One zip file is a custom “Recovery” program called ClockWork Mod (CWM.) The other much larger zip file will contain the ROM itself.
3. Reboot into recovery and click on the CWM zip file to install it. (You may need to do this twice.)
4. From the new ClockWorkMod Recovery menu, click on the ROM’s zip file to start the flash.
After the flash is done, you select ‘reboot’ from the recovery menu and you are done! The first reboot can take several minutes, but it is an exciting time.. as you anticipate how much more fun your phone is going to be.
Here’s the video showing the steps in more detail:
I finally got my Samsung Galaxy S phone back from repair. Like many other GT-i9000M Canadian Galaxy S phones, mine had also suffered the infamous SD card failure. As the phone was 2 months old when then internal SD card went, I had to send it in for a warranty repair. It only took Samsung SIX weeks to repair it!!!
When I got the phone back on Friday, I was half expecting it to have Froyo on it. However it was returned with the same Eclair firmware that it shipped with in September – Android 2.1-update1.
I started looking around XDA for a good custom Froyo 2.2 ROM. I decided to go with Darky’s newest Froyo ROM – Version 6.0 Gingerbread Edition. (This is still an Android 2.2 ROM, but with some Gingerbread theming.) So this morning I rooted the phone, installed a custom recovery, and flashed the ROM.
I was impressed with how easy it was to do this. Darky has conveniently included the FULL ROM in one package. It only took 10 minutes for the whole flash to take place, and this ROM is SUPER AWESOME. I am definitely amazed with what a difference it makes to the phone.
Some of the benefits:
1. Heavily optimized and blazing fast
2. All the latest Google Apps, including GMail and Youtube
3. Gingerbread Launcher, Gingerbread keyboard, Gingerbread live wallpapers
So far the only thing I can find that doesn’t work is haptic feedback with the gingerbread keyboard. Other than that everything else has been working perfectly.
So far I am thoroughly enjoying this new ROM – Darky is a genius and has cooked up a fantastic ROM that I would recommend to anyone without hesitation.
Here is a quick video so you can see this wicked fast ROM in action.
The Samsung Galaxy S phones pack some serious performance firepower. Everyone wants to know just how fast that Hummingbird processor runs.
The easiest way to observe its performance is to just use it. Flipping through screens, opening apps, and carrying out general tasks on it will immediately reveal some of the capabilities of this blazing processor. But if you are a true gearhead, you probably would like some real performance data to go with your general seat of the pants impressions.
Well, lucky for you, there are several popular apps you can use to benchmark the performance of your Galaxy S. It is important to note that these testing apps should only be used as a guideline for relative comparison, rather than as an absolute measurement of real performance.
Quadrant is one of the most popular choices to test speed on Android phones. While there are many who think Quadrant scores are useless, as it is significantly biased towards I/O performance, enthusiasts commonly use the Quadrant app to ‘measure’ how the performance of their phone changes.
Quadrant may not tell you much when comparing across phones. For example if you see that a stock Galaxy S scores 900 and a Droid X scores 1100, it does not necessarily mean the Droid X will be faster in general day-to-day use.
But what Quadrant and other tests like it are good for is to compare relative performance among phones that are the same model. For example, If your Galaxy S gets 1600, and someone else’s Galaxy S gets 1000, then it is reasonably safe to say that in certain performance measures, your Galaxy S is Faster than your friend’s.
These tests are also very useful to measure the effects of software changes on your phone.
You can do a test when your phone is brand new out of the box, and then test it again after you have 50 apps installed. Did it slow down? How about that new lagfix or custom ROM you flashed… just how much faster did that make your phone?
In the video I run an initial Quadrant test on my phone right out of the box when it was new. I wanted a baseline measurement.
905 is what my brand new phone got before I made any changes to it. After I had installed nearly 50 apps, I ran another Quadrant test. This time I got 880 which tells me that even with the added ‘load’ of all these apps, at the very least Quadrant did not find much evidence to suggest my phone is much slower.. 880 and 905 are too close.. It’s basically the same. Now let’s see what kind of Quadrant score I get after trying one of the lagfix options out there.
In many countries the Samsung Galaxy S phones are sold SIM locked to local telephone carriers. This prevents you from using the phone on a different carrier.
To unlock a phone, you need that phone’s particular unlock code. Each phone has its own unique unlock code. Most GSM phones are easy to unlock. Samsung Galaxy S phones in many cases are especially easy to unlock. This is because that unlock code is stored unencrypted in a file on that phone. So once you know where to look, you can see read the phone’s unlock code.
The developer community has made this even easier by writing apps to retreive the code for you. The easiest way is to go to the Android Market and search for an app for your Samsung Galaxy S phone.
In Canada the first Galaxy S variant was released on Aug 6th. I bought one right away, but could not lock it at first as the hackers had not figured out an unlock method. This changed on Aug 21, when they discovered the code was stored in the phone. A day later a script was available that went into the directory that contained the file, opened the file with the unlock code, and displays it to the user.
Here is the video how-to on unlocking your phone using the script from XDA-Developers.
