My trusted Android road-warrior — the Galaxy S — completed 2-years sometime late last year. I had picked up the phone as a replacement for my tough-as-nails Nokia E71, long before the platforms were burning and tablets and mini-tablets had become the rage. To say that the phone has exceeded my expectations would be an accurate statement. As my first touchscreen phone and as my first Andorid phone, I had expected the experience to be ghastly and that the phone would not last for more than a year. I could not have been any more wrong about all that.
The phone is currently running a stock build of Jelly Bean (Android 4.2.1) and other than a deadboot (completely my fault, fixed at a local mobile phone repair shop with a JTAG flash), the device has been flawless. OK, not entirely, I also managed to make the camera unusable after scratching the lens cover pretty badly. In spite of Samsung trying its best to shaft its customers with all the Touchwiz madness and glacially slow firmware updates, this phone will easily continue to go into the pages of history for reasons other than being the phone that started the thermonuclear war with Apple.
Other than being one of the best developer-supported Android handsets, what I love about the phone is how sturdily it is built. It has been dunked in water multiple times, keeps surviving regular falls with unfailing regularity (to the extent that I often ‘demo’ it to friends, eliciting their unparalleled shock) and has withstood my general grubby and clumsy usage. These were the qualities that endeared the Nokias to me a long long time ago and I still retain the E71 (which is fully functional) as one of my backup phones.
I can say with reasonable certainty that come August 2013, I will still be using the phone as long as it keeps going and if it does not get stolen or gets lost. The strange part is that even though the Android ecosystem has changed drastically in the two-years I have had this phone, my desire to switch to a different handset has always been fairly low. It needs to be kept in mind that my smartphone requirements have only regressed over that period. I don’t game at all on the device, there are a few productivity apps and it is used to play music in the car when I drive.
If you take out two important factors — a superb camera and games — Android phones can perform 90% of the functionality (forget NFC for the time being), of the other functions across the board all the way down to Gingerbread. I know this for a fact due to my second phone – Micromax A73. I prefer shooting photos with a proper camera now and don’t use mobile phones for that purpose and I can say that my gaming days are now pretty much behind me. For a while I kept evaluating the Nexus 4, but I just could not convince myself that it was worth the premium I’d have to pay for it.
On the other hand, my regular run-ins with iOS only serves to reaffirm my belief that it is a fine, polished OS and an ecosystem, but it is simply not the right option for me. Having ruled that option out, I am not sure what will be my next smartphone at the higher end of the market.
Samsung Galaxy S, GT-19000: Two-Year Review
