Inevitable Android
Disclaimer: This is a technology business news site. As such we must warn you that the following review is neither the first, nor the most thorough. What follows is one person's experience of using the device for a short while, and is designed to offer a taste of what it's like to use it, rather than exhaustive buying advice. In short: it's anecdotal not empirical.
The Samsung Galaxy S is Samsung's most successful smartphone to date. At time of writing it had sold seven million of them, with three million of those in the US market alone.
This success may well elicit mixed emotions from Samsung, however, as the smartphone launch it has probably thrown more of its weight behind is the Wave. The reason for this is that the Wave was the first to run on Samsung's own smartphone platform - Bada - while the Galaxy S runs on Android.
Now we already know that Android is a perfectly good smartphone OS - and is currently the fastest growing - so why would Samsung, which is not known for its software, bother developing its own platform rather than just going 100 percent Android like a good little OEM? The answer is, of course, differentiation.
As I will explore in this review, an Android phone is quite equivalent to a Windows notebook. People don't say "wow, is that an Acer?" or whatever, when they see a Windows PC, because they know the user experience is essentially the same whoever made it. Yes, the power of the machine can vary enormously, and some OEMs might give it go-faster stripes, but when you open it up and turn it on, you pretty much know exactly what you're going to get.
Just as the user experience on a PC is defined by the OS, so it is on a smartphone. The reason Samsung is developing Bada is the same as HTC with Sense, Motorola with Motoblur, and Nokia rejecting Android and WP7 entirely. To avoid becoming commoditised, and thus reduced to competing solely on price, they need to offer something unique.
Such is the sophistication of the phone components market that most handsets tick all the feature boxes - 3G, GPS, camera, etc - and so it's difficult to differentiate on hardware alone. That leaves software, which comes down to the UI and the apps. There's probably only room for three or four app ecosystems (Apple, Android and another), so that leaves the UI.
I've been using a Motorola Milestone Android phone for the past few months and so feel in a good position to evaluate what the Samsung Galaxy S offers that's different. But what I must begin with is how seamless the transition is from one Android handset to another.
One of the cool things about Android phones - and the whole point of them from Google's point of view - is how well they integrate with Google's many cloud services. For example: not only is it very easy to access your Gmail from any Android phone, if you've been saving your contacts to your Gmail account they automatically sync to another Android phone as soon as you log on to Google.
