Hi there, since it seems you're only getting one side of the argument, I wanted to offer my appraisal of the Desire and Galaxy S, having owned both.
First let me say, they're both excellent phones. Either way you'll almost certainly be happy with your choice.
However, there are some significant differences that in my view will determine how often you might wonder if life might have been a bit easier if you made the other choice. I should qualify my statements first by saying I'm a happy Desire owner and I only had the Galaxy S for one full day... but I WAS on it the entire day.
First and foremost is the optical trackpad. In my opinion, it's a very important and valuable feature of the Desire. For instance, imagine you're typing a long message on your phone as I am now, and you notice a typo. On the Galaxy, you're probably in for some frustration as you try to tap in just the right spot to make the correction. In frustration you might retype a word altogether or be forced to switch to an arrow key mode which may not be available on all keyboards, should you choose to use an alternate one such as BlindType once it's released. And trust me, trying to select a section of text (for copy+paste) will not go well.
On the other hand, the Galaxy S has a slightly faster CPU and a vastly superior graphics rendering subsystem. That said, games which will take advantage of this aren't going to be a common sight any time soon, since developers must make their apps with compatibility in mind. And also the very limited app storage space on virtually all Android phones to date precludes the possibility of high resolution textures or anything like that. In the VERY few apps that currently take advantage though, you will unquestionably have much better framerates.
While on the topic of games though, the optical trackpad makes another appearance - it's excellent for controlling games.
IMHO games aren't likely to be your top priority though. The fact is (and I'll be happy to back this up) cellphone gaming is in its infancy and isn't going to replace your DS or PSP anytime soon. Phone games are time wasters primarily. There are exceptions, but they are just that. In two to three years' time the situation will be different I'd imagine, but by that time you'll be looking for your next phone so it's not really relevant to this discussion.
I've been pretty one-sided so far, so I'll try to balance that out now. The Galaxy S has a better screen, hands down. It even uses less power as long as it's not displaying something really bright. It does somewhat oversaturate colors though, but not enough to complain about. The screen may have a crippling weakness though: burn-in. All earlier AMOLED screens have had this problem pretty bad, but it's too early to tell if these newer panels have the same problem. Its camera is also IMHO, significantly better, especially in low light. And I must mention that its touch sensitivity is definitely more accurate and technically proficient. The Desire can only sense two touch points at a time, and even then it's doing so in a kind of hacky way that's easily confused, although you're unlikely to notice the vast majority of the time. There's also the front-facing camera to consider, if the model you're looking at comes with one. Just remember that VOIP traffic is frequently banned by cell providers, is easy to detect, will get you instantly terminated with some bonus early cancellation fees, has higher than normal latency usually by about a tenth of a second both ways even in ideal situations (so about a quarter second lag most of the time unless you're on wifi), and doesn't yet have a mature software support base.
The last big point worth making I think is the fact that you're posting on this particular forum, meaning that you have some interest in hacking your phone. Unlike the Desire, you'll be hacking your Galaxy S at the first opportunity out of absolute necessity rather than curiosity or wanting to unlock deeper functions. You might as well just pretend it has no warranty, since you'll be voiding it on day one.
The bad part is, you might not be able to get the range or quality of custom OS's since the Galaxy S line is so new and historically Samaung has been a crappy smartphone manufacturer so people don't know their hardware very well. There are still a lot of unknowns, relatively speaking. That's unlike the Desire, which is virtually identical to Google's designated "developer phone", the Nexus. As a result the Desire is very well-understood and we have complete, easy root over it now, not to mention a huge developer community. You might buy your Galaxy S only to learn it's a variant that's not very popular - and even the most common model still has no official CyanogenMod release for it, which means the custom OS developers won't enjoy the head start CM gives them.
In summary, I think the Desire is a less advanced, but much more well-rounded phone that offers greater flexibility and a guarantee of strong community support. Samsung's got the "it" phone of the moment, but in six months time there will be another "ultimate" phone, and perhaps from a manufacturer that is more experienced. But in six months, the Desire will still be a very well-rounded phone that has only one major weakness, its lack of a hardware keyboard.
Edited by nawoa, 01 November 2010 - 04:56 AM.
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elijahblake, on 15 October 2010 - 03:37 PM, said:
