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Galaxy S Vs Desire

mickoneill30

Having had a Desire (standard one, not the HD) for the last few months and having used a Galaxy S for testing for the last week I thought I'd post my impressions on the differences.

Screen
Great on both but when you're looking at both at the same time for the same app and set at the same brightness the Galaxy S is better. It's bigger and the colours are brighter.

Memory
The Galaxy S comes with more memory than the Desire built in. I haven't had to worry about messing around with moving apps to SD like I did with the Desire. Well not yet anyway which is good because ....
Edit: Changed the line above as I'm not sure how much exactly either phone has.

OS
The Desire has 2.2. The Galaxy S has 2.1. It's due an update soon (apparently).

Updates
The Desire updates over the air with no PC interaction. The Galaxy S needs Kies installed on your PC which doesn't seem like a solid application.

Responsiveness
The Galaxy S was initially very fast but I don't know what I've done to it. With the same apps as the Desire when I press a button on the screen it can take 1 - 10 seconds for the app to open or for a menu item to respond. This doesn't happen on the Desire and it's quite annoying.
Edit: After Googling this it appears this is common and there are apps you can get to fix this. They seem messy to install though. Bit weird that Samsung thought this was acceptable. Maybe the imminent 2.2 update will help.

Camera.
No flash on Galaxy S. Other than that I've had similar results for photos.

Battery.
I get similar results from both (just over a day of reasonable use).

Apps installed as standard.
The widgets for the Desire seem more polished. Clock & Weather are two items I like on my home screen. I had to go to Market to get better ones for the Galaxy S.
The Calendar / SMS / Mail apps on the Desire "look" better to me. The Galaxys ones are king of square looking. This is subjective I suppose and not a major issue anyway as I install Handcent and K9 as they're better than both manufacturers apps anyway.
The Samsung has some games as standard that are very good looking. I don't play them much though. Angry Birds FTW.

Media support.
Out of the box the Galaxy S plays avi without having to mess about with converting the files. The Desire doesn't. Buuuut you can download RockPlayer or ArcMedia to play avis for both and I prefer ArcMedia over the stock app on the Samsung. You can tell ArcMedia to only show video from one folder, the Samsung app finds every playable file on your device and shows them in a big list which is messy (to me, some people might prefer that).
You can get a TV Out cable for the Galaxy S. I haven't tried that but that's a cool feature. Can't do that on Desire.
The Samsung has some apps for streaming to other devices or from servers. I haven't played with them though.

Weight
The Desire isn't heavy but bleedin hell the Galaxy S is light.

HTC Sense Vs Touchscreen Interface
I use apps like Multicon so I only really use one or two screens on the UI so to me neither interface makes much difference.
However when you swipe down the Galaxy notification bar you get buttons for WiFi / Bluetooth / Silent. Nice touch.

Keyboard.
Probably an unfair comparison. I've been using the Desire for months and I love its keyboard. The default keyboard on the Galaxy is crap but it comes with Swype installed which is much better but is taking me a while to get used to. I seemed to be able to do more with less clicks on the Desire keyboard.
The Desire has a little tiny touchpad that you can use for moving your cursor along a field of text or SMS that you've typed. The Galaxy doesn't. You have to press roughly where you want to edit text and delete until you get to the correct spot. Only a little niggle.

None of this is scientific, just my opinion.

Given the choice between the 2 I'll be going back to the Desire. I can get over the Desires shortcomings but the main shortcoming on the Galaxy S is responsiveness. It's not bad but the Desire is much better. I've restored to defaults and rebooted a few times but it's not as snappy as the Desire.

If I find anything else to compare I'll post it here.

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boardswalker

mickoneill30 wrote: »

Memory
The Galaxy S comes with 5Gb built in.

Are you sure about the memory, my phone came with 512MB RAM, 2GB ROM, 16 GB Internal SD and an external SD slot which can take up to 32GB.

As for the lag, theres a fix on the market - OCLF. Installing was easy enough, just finding the right buttons to press to launch the reboot was an issue as they seem to change from phone to phone. OCLF has a module called minfree which alters the samsung set minfree settings. It seems to be widely agreed that samsung have set these too low and this causes the lag.

There's a good thread here http://forum.xda-developers.com/archive/index.php/t-787104.html.

This comment sums it up "The Android way of multitasking is working really good, it just needs some fine tuning with the Galaxy S. Somehow, the default settings cause too much cleaning up right when you start certain apps, this it feels laggy"

mickoneill30

boardswalker wrote: »

Are you sure about the memory, my phone came with 512MB RAM, 2GB ROM, 16 GB Internal SD and an external SD slot which can take up to 32GB.

Nope, I'm not sure at all. Some app I ran told me that I had loads of memory even before I put in my SD card. The point remains though that I've installed piles of apps without getting the out of memory error that I used to get on the Desire. So I've edited the line in my original post.

I googled the lag problem after I posted that stuff above and found some sites pointing to fixes like that. There are loads though and looked like they needed the phone to be rooted (I don't want to do this). Now that I've read more about it, the lag is annoying me more.

This thread seems to be the most up to date (unless you can point to a newer one).

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=784691
Edit: The app on that link needs root access. I'm kind of wary of rooting to fix something in case I can't update at a future date. I kind of think this is the manufacturers responsibility.

reb73

mickoneill30 wrote: »

This thread seems to be the most up to date (unless you can point to a newer one).

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=784691

That's just the one that's the easiest to install for a generic smartphone user and not necessarily the latest or the best (Voodoo and Universal Lagfix yeild a much smoother user experience, but not necessarily the best benchmark scores).

But, most of these better lagfixes come in shape of Kernels or combined with custom ROMS, so rooting and a bit of risk is almost a pre-requisite!

For the really adventurous SGS owners, this kernel looks very interesting indeed

mickoneill30

mickoneill30 wrote: »

Given the choice between the 2 I'll be going back to the Desire. I can get over the Desires shortcomings but the main shortcoming on the Galaxy S is responsiveness. It's not bad but the Desire is much better. I've restored to defaults and rebooted a few times but it's not as snappy as the Desire.

The Galaxy annoyed me enough yesterday that I thought I needed to enhance that last paragraph.

Given the choice between the 2 I'd go to the Desire any day. The lag got annoying yesterday after I installed some apps (that work fine on any other phone I've seen).
The lag issue is experienced by many people and is on many forums (but no mention of it on Samsungs support area).
I thought I'd update the firmware so ran Kies on my PC. Works fine for transferring files but won't see the phone in Kies mode. I've Win 7 64 so I thought I'd try another PC with Win 7 32. Different issues but same result and finally I tried it on Windows XP. I couldn't get the phone to connect to the Kies software on any PC to update the firmware. This is another problem discussed at length in many forums (and I tried all their suggestions).

So, unable to get a Samsung update I rooted the phone and installed One Click Lag Fix.

Now the phone works great. As good as the Desire. But that's the point, I hate having to mess around like that to get it working properly and I don't know what most users would do. I'm sure the issues don't happen to most users but they happen enough for them to be listed on various forums.

Why did Samsung think it'd be a good idea to connect to a PC to do an update (that's kind of Appley thinking). They're missing the point of Android. When using Android I'm finding I need to use a PC less and less. Having the phone unable to update itself unless you have a PC is crap. The Desire was just click a couple of buttons and watch the phone reboot a few times.

So now that the phone is rooted it's great and I like it. The hardware quality is great, the phone is fast and the screen is beautiful. But if I was recommending one for anybody else I'd recommend the Desire because of the messing about I had to do.

Note: the only 3 Androids I've used properly are Desire / Galaxy S / Sony Ericsson X10. That last one is nice enough but doesn't have multi touch and is still stuck on Android 1.6.

As an aside I've put on Launcher Pro + & Beautiful Widgets. If you don't have them read about them and see if they're worth about a fiver. The phone looks great with those installed (more functional than either the Desires or Sonys UIs).

Inquitus

mickoneill30 wrote: »

As an aside I've put on Launcher Pro + & Beautiful Widgets. If you don't have them read about them and see if they're worth about a fiver. The phone looks great with those installed (more functional than either the Desires or Sonys UIs).

I disagree, launcherpro is a poor mans sense, it's not as zippy, not as polished and just not as good.

I currently run Open Desire which is a non-sense ROM coupled with Launcher Pro and Fancy Widget to give me that faux sense look and the Twitter and Facebook widgets, and I am happy enough with it as I like Open Desire alot as a ROM, but having used both Sense and Non-Sense ROMS extensively I can tell you Launcher Pro is just a second rate Sense.

mickoneill30

Inquitus wrote: »

I disagree, launcherpro is a poor mans sense, it's not as zippy, not as polished and just not as good.

Ah I'll agree to disagree.

The thread isn't about Launcher Pro but being able to resize icons so you can fit more rows on the screen, having the home screen rotate when you turn the phone and being able to customise the 4 permanent icons on the bottom of the screen are all features that are non existant in HTC Sense.
(I've got one icon for SMS (Handcent) as one of my permanent 4 and when I swipe that icon it opens email (K9). For the browser a click opens the browser or a swipe pops up the bookmarks. That is just cool.
You can resize widgets too but I'm not bothered about that.

I haven't noticed any performance problem with it on the Galaxy (now that I've rooted the bleeding thing) and side by side with the Desire it's zippy. That might be to do with differning hardware though.

For normal users the HTC Sense doesn't give a pile of extra functionality that they'd appreciate but as I'm used to Sense I thought I'd put this on the Galaxy and I like it's extra bits.

I've attached 2 screenshots to this post for users who doen't know what I'm talking about. The glaring white boxes with red borders are bits I've overwritten in Paint as it showed calendar entries or todo stuff.

The Clock is from Beautiful Widgets. The smaller icons are from Multicon.

I haven't used Open Sense. I'll have a look at it.

Inquitus

IMHO resized icons look like **** and I hate homescreen rotation, but each to their own, also the widgets integrate better in Sense with your contacts. The Launcher Pro guy is rewriting it from the bottom up atm, hopefully it will be greatly improved when he's finished.

And find yourself a copy of Fancy Widget, the HTC clock is the best avail on Android, and Fancy Widget is a pure knockoff, which is why its no longer on the market.

Also, its Open Desire the ROM I mentioned, its non-sense.

mickoneill30

I'll have a look for that Fancy Widget. Thanks.

Inquitus

I like Launcher Pro, don't get me wrong, that's why I bought it, it's just not as good as sense, simples. The widgets aren't as good, don't integrate as well, it doesn't run as well, and it can be buggy. Homescreen rotation randomly turns on on reboot for me for example.

mickoneill30

Inquitus wrote: »

I like Launcher Pro, don't get me wrong, that's why I bought it, it's just not as good as sense, simples. The widgets aren't as good, don't integrate as well, it doesn't run as well, and it can be buggy.

That could all be true and probably is, I've only been using it for a day so I'm no expert on it.
But after a day I've had no problem, I'll post back in a week or two.

I thought the Galaxy S was good after a day or twos use too

Look how that turned out.

I'm not a fan of its widgets either. The only one I really used on the Desire was the Clock & Weather so to replicate that Beautiful Widgets or Fancy Widgets are needed.

drunkmonkey

I took the launcher off my Galaxy it seemed to eat the battery? Anyone else had that or know a work around.

+1 for the Galaxy over the Desires

Inquitus

mickoneill30 wrote: »

That could all be true and probably is, I've only been using it for a day so I'm no expert on it.
But after a day I've had no problem, I'll post back in a week or two.

I thought the Galaxy S was good after a day or twos use too

You'll be very happy with launcher pro, of that I have no doubt at all, it's excellent, my only contention is its not as good as the stock sense framework I use it to replace. The pinch on homescreen to see the 6 homescreens is very slow on my phone, and as I said the autorotate on homescreen option keeps re-enabling on boot.

I'd be interested to know if the pinch to see the 6 homescreens works well for you over the next while, if you have a chance to try it out for a few days.

mickoneill30

Inquitus wrote: »

I'd be interested to know if the pinch to see the 6 homescreens works well for you over the next while, if you have a chance to try it out for a few days.

I only really use one or 2 homescreens (which is why I like the small icons). Most common items on screen 1, lesser items on screen 2, everything else in the app list.

I'll enable 6 homescreens and put some photos or something on them and report back in a week.

Inquitus

If you are having a look for Fancy Widget 1.3.0 is the final version afair.