c0up

I was forced to buy a new phone yesterday, my previous phone being an HTC Magic. I bought a Samsung Galaxy S based purely on the word of 3 different people. I didn't even know the specs on the thing. I didn't even know how it looked. Thank god then that the phone is so frakn amazing, because buyer's remorse is a bitch!

Oh, and this ain't no detailed Engadget review going through each aspect of the phone. It is purely what I've experienced over the last 1.5 days.

The good

• The 480x800 Super AMOLED 4" screen makes me smile every time I look at it! It is absolutely gorgeous, feels fantastic, and the seamless divx support that made watching a True Blood episode so simple was a definite "WOW!" moment
• It is speedy and responsive as hell. Bear in mind, I came from a hacked and somewhat laggy HTC Magic, and this phone really brings out Android's multitasking capabilities. And this is without the lag fix. I installed it just now for the sake of it, and although the numbers from Quadrant Standard show a huge difference before and after [900 to 2050], I really can't feel a difference, and didn't experience any lag in all the time I used it
• Google and The Cloud meant that within a couple of minutes, I had all my mail and contacts back!
• Swype comes pre-installed, and typing swyping becomes a joy, to the point that I look forward to every time I have to send a message / tweet / email
• Grooveshark was made for this phone! It flies, and I spent a good hour in the car today streaming via 2G and 3G with no issues whatsoever! Of course I need to sync my playlists and download them onto the phone, but it worked flawlessly
• The capacitive buttons feel a lot nicer than their HTC Magic equivalent

The bad

• I can has moar bloatware? Good lord, Optus, you've really mastered carrier bloatware. Obviously it's not really intrusive in any other way than seeing those Optus icons in your app drawer, but still, annoying
• Speaking of app drawer, the default Samsung one looks quite terrible, and whoever decided to order apps by install date [without the option of changing how these apps are ordered] should be shot. In the head. Twice. Luckily, this is an Android phone, and Federico Carnales has created LauncherPro, a replacement "Home" app that offers a ton of customisation capabilities along with a healthy dose of sexy.
• No LED indicator. Now, this could be pretty minor to most, but I started relying on that LED for notifications, obsessively staring at the indicator, waiting for it to blink, and had the colours customised for different types of notifications, etc. Then again, maybe I'm just a weirdo, and will now instead have to push the "Home" button every minutes to see if I've missed anything.

The indifferent

• No flash on the camera. This could be a big deal to some, and I didn't even realise it until @neerav's pretty apt summary of the HTC Desire vs Samsung Galaxy S. It would've been a nice to have for those drunken nights when I want to take a photo of an embarrassing situation... No, wait, no flash = good!
• No trackball. I've found myself reaching for the trackball on a few occasions when swyping, as it was a precise way to move between characters; I'm assuming I'll get over it.
• It has an FM radio! But you can only seemingly use it when your headphones are plugged in o_O

Again, these are very early impressions of the phone, but I'm absolutely lovin' it, and eagerly awaiting Froyo and Gingerbread.

UPDATE:

One more annoyance that I was reminded about while reading something just now; Samsung's Kies software, which is some attempt at iTunes-like functionality. I much prefer to just drag & drop files via Windows Explorer, and if you want to just use the internal 16 gigs as a mass storage drive, you need to first go into Settings -> About phone -> USB settings and select 'Mass storage'. Otherwise, the phone will whinge about drivers being needed when you plug it in and mount the device.