If you are planning to buy the Samsung Galaxy S smartphone anytime soon, perhaps you should take your time because the phone has GPS problems which prevent you from getting a precise lock on your location. While this may not be a real dampener if you are not planning to use the GPS feature that much, it is a flaw in the phone nonetheless.
And if you do plan to use it for GPS navigation or fitness tracking, then you will have a dud in your hands. Thankfully Samsung has promised to rectify this problem via phone updates it will release in September. Even the Samsung Vibrant and the Samsung Captivate have the same problem and the updates will affect these phones too .
And to allay your fears about the Epic 4G: it does not have a GPS problem. This has been revealed by both independent tests and an official statement from Samsung in the wake of the GPS issues surrounding the other phones. Both the network assisted (indoor) and outdoor GPS work fine on the Epic.
Google Maps gives pretty precise locations on the Epic 4G and thus you can go ahead and get the phone when it finally launches on the 31st of this month. While that is good news, you should hope that the updates actually take care of the GPS problems. Problems? Yes actually there are two at this moment on the Galaxy S, Vibrant and Captivate.
The first one as mentioned earlier is an inability to pin-point your location via GPS even with wireless networks turned on. At the most what you get is a location roughly off the mark by 1000-1500 meters, which to say the least is pretty useless.
The second problem and one that is related to the first is that the GPS circuitry and software are not working. Particularly the Galaxy S models are failing to convert GPS signals into precise coordinates and hence the problems. No home brew solutions have been developed for these problems so far and the hope rests solely on the promised firmware upgrades.
It is indeed baffling how most smartphones these days are coming out with glitches which are anything but minor.
