The samsung Galaxy S i9000 was Samsungs flagship phone that was released to be a main competitor to Apple’s iPhone.
Although the Galaxy S was quite comparable specifications wise to the iPhones of the same era the software was no where near as polished as what iOS was and several people experienced issues with lagging response.
I purchased one of the i9000 handsets when they were released as I knew that Googles android operating system that comes with it was an open source platform – not closed like iOS. I wanted to see how far the Android OS and the devices had come since I initially used an HTC Dream running Android 1.1.
There was a significant jump between 1.1 and 2.2 that the Galaxy S shipped with, the interface was much more polished however lacked operational speed. Everyone hates slow technology. Disappointed I began to research whether others had speed issues and what they had done to solve them.
One of the main reasons these phones lagged so badly with the original software was that Samsung used their own filesystem that meant that large cachces of write operations would bank up and then all be passed to the disk at a single point in time.
I continued to search and found a custom firmware called Darkys ROM. This ROM set the stage for many others by using an ext2 filesystem – commonly used in linux distributions. I installed this ROM and needless to say my speed issue was resolved and many other abilities were available using this particular firmware.
Software is only one issue they have had though – GPS locking was another let down. Many of the alternative firmwares offered fixes for this by changing the GPS servers – however the most successful modification to strengthen your GPS signal is to remove the black tape covering the antenna that is right next to where your sim card it. Be very careful removing it though, use a small flatblade and slowly lift the tape and it will reveal the antenna.