I have purchased my first Android powered phone in December 2009. It was good looking Samsung Galaxy i7500 that ran Android OS version 1.5.

My first impressions were OK if I exclude the camera picture quality, the battery problem and the fact that even after solving it my new phone lasted shorter time then my previous phone (which I replaced because of low battery life, ouch…). Overall, the phone was great since I got an internet enabled device with a full browser and a GPS device in it. Soon I discovered other features that were missing or weren’t complete, for example Bluetooth for file exchange was missing, I couldn’t connect to WEP networks protected with a certificate, the picture browser was very basic, NPS for phone synchronization didn’t support synchronization and similar. I was really satisfied with the number of (more or less useful) applications in the Market. I was disappointed with the GPS because it didn’t have navigation.

After some time of using the phone I have noted that the phone has become slow and inresposive. This might be because of a big number of applications that have installed, but this should not happen if I’m not running them.

I have also discovered several bugs on my i7500 that are still not solved.

But the real frustration began when Google started to release newer Android OS versions. I have discovered that Samsung doesn’t offer proper support for this phone. There were no bug fixes and absolutely no OS upgrades for this phone. I have read and wrote about the firmware with Android OS version 1.6 released, but I still didn’t receive it over the NPS updates.

Now the Android 2.2 is out and I’m still running my phone with Android 1.5. Samsung missed versions 1.6, 2.0, 2.1 and is now missing 2.2 so I’m five version behind the world. All this might not be important if my phone wasn’t only 6 months old. I’m not able to accept the fact that I bought a top-end phone and after half a year I am looking forward to replace it because newer and better phones are available.

Recently, I got an answer from the officials at Samsung Slovenia saying that my Samsung Galaxy i7500 will never get the update to 1.6 or higher.