Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev, Says Get to Work | Hacker News Reader

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev, Says Get to Work

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98 pointsbodski19 comments

After two previous Android phones - and their UI latency (all), one-day-or-less batteries (all) poor quality touch sensors (HTC Desire / Nexus One were shipped with screens that don't allow points to cross) and general lack of quality, I recently purchased a Galaxy S II after reading the engadget and Slashgear reviews (engadget's: 'not just the best Android phone, but may be the best smartphone, period').

I'm not going to wax lyrical - go read some proper reviews for that - but after two weeks, I'm stoked. I've got two days of battery consistently with heavy use, the screen is the most vibrant and daylight visible I've ever seen on any phone, and Android has no slowdown whatsoever.

It's not perfect (the phone beeps when it hits 100% charge in the middle of the night unless it's on silent mode) but it is the best phone I've ever owned and, per those reviews above, I'm not the only one.

Glad to hear that, I'm picking mine up today. And this move from Samsung just made me even more happier. The future is looking bright.

It is a truly excellent phone. Two minor faults: no notification led, in-call volume could be higher.

Since it's an AMOLED screen and any black pixel is essentially "off", you can substitute the notification LED for the entire display with NoLED: http://www.devasque.com/noled/index.php

Is the plastic housing strong? The first Galaxy S was nice but the thing felt like a childs toy that I would smash as soon as it was dropped. And the gps was 100% defective, really put a bad taste in my mouth.

G2 is extremely tough as its made of plastic and aluminum which I've used very often.

It feels stronger than the HTC desire - the phone is thin, so there's no air/give when you push in the batter cover. It also eschews the shiny plastic back of the first Galaxy S in favor of a passport-like surface, which is a lot grippier.

GPS on SII works - see reviews.

the screen is the most vibrant ... I've ever seen on any phone

I compared the screens of my iPhone 4 with my colleague's new S2, and I have to say that the S2 screen is like a TV configured for store demo - way too much saturation. While colors on the iPhone look natural, on the S2 everyone looks like they've been out in the sun for a few hours more than they should have.

To change it, Settings > Display > Background Effect. Switch from 'Dynamic' to 'Standard' or 'Movie' (same as a Sumsung TV).

Thanks, I'll let him know!

With proper settings the AMOLED just blows the iPhone out of the water. I have loaded the same Flickr accounts on both side by side, the extra contrast is very noticeable.

Samsung has spent considerable effort getting better utilization of the PowerVR GPU, originally for the Galaxy Tab. It's really quite a shame these kind of under the hood optimizations are so far out of the mind of consumers; factors such as responsiveness and scrolling quality severely impact perceived experience, but there aren't good metrics and consumers don't know to look for them.

I'm still watching and waiting to see if Samsung will provide support for a single one of their products as long as Apple has. So far, they keep flooding the market with new gadgets, but as a last-gen Samsung Moment user who's been officially abandoned by Samsung and Sprint, left with a half-baked device[1], I've got a fairly bad impression of their offerings, even if the initial hype is positive. Call my cynical, but I can't fawn over any of their products until a single one of them has made it through a full contract cycle without being abandoned.

[1] Boring details: The RIL driver in the Moment will randomly crash causing data lockups and/or full radio failure, requiring a restart to re-enable the phone part of...the phone, it's been a persistent problem through their 1.5 to 2.1 official releases of Android, and the phone which was released in Nov 2009, was fully abandoned around May 2010, it will never get officially updated again. Sprint would trade me for a downgrade refurbed phone of a different model (HTC Hero is all that really came close) but would not allow for free contract termination, or a free upgrade without renewing the contract. After my experience, I'm switching to Apple and Verizon when my contract ends since I feel neither Samsung or Sprint deserve any further business. Google 'moment data lockup' for more info.

I was having the same symptoms on my HTC Dream on Rogers, I wonder if the root problem was the same. Enabling only 2G networks stopped the issue at the cost of paying full price for crippled data.

After fighting with Rogers and 2 phone replacements on warranty and no co-operation to reasonably upgrade to a different phone I gave up and purchased an unlocked used iphone - it works without issue.

Personally I like the Android OS and UI better but I need my phone to not randomly stop being a phone.

Reddit /r/Android discussion here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ht1il/nice_move_sam...

Apparently this is the first Android phone to ship with 100% open source kernel (drivers and all).

Only problem with this phone is that android 2.3.4 isn't available for it yet, and 2.3.3 has a bug where suspend and events/0 will randomly start maxing out a core and kill your battery. I contacted Samsung and they said the release of 2.3.4 is "waiting on google", whatever that means.

Waiting on google means waiting for approval for market access?

As an original Galaxy S owner, this is kind of a poke in the eye. A good thing in general though.

What filesystem does the Galaxy S II use? That's the biggest problem with the first iteration, after the broken GPS.

Apparently it uses ext4 [1] and the GPS is markedly improved [2]

[1] http://androidforums.com/samsung-galaxy-s2/313715-samsung-ga...

[2] http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/29/samsung-galaxy-s-ii-gps-i...

The more I hear about this phone the more I want it. Looks like they've unleashed a killer.

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