As we await the Samsung Galaxy S10, it’s worth remembering that the first Galaxy S wasn’t just one phone. It was four.
It’s a different world since Samsung introduced the first Galaxy S phone nine years ago. Flip phones are nearly gone from the Earth, “smartphones” are now just phones, and making a call is an afterthought, if you happen to make calls at all.
Another change is that, when it went on sale, the Galaxy S was just another Android phone fighting for attention in a crowded field. But now as we await the release of the Galaxy S10 on Wednesday, the Galaxy S name represents the top of the Android world. It’s a reputation Samsung is proud to own for its flagship phone, and rightly so. But in 2010, you may not have even known you were buying a Galaxy S at all.
Importantly, the first Galaxy S wasn’t a single phone. Though it landed at all big four US carriers around the same time, it was split into four personalities, one for each carrier. These names sounded straight out of a motivational seminar (the Captivate! the Fascinate!) and features varied slightly between the models. Sprint’s phone went so far as to add (gasp!) a physical keyboard, while the other three were candybar designs. It was a thing carriers did at the time — stand apart from your rivals by marketing a unique device that only you had — but the result was a perplexing experience for customers. (Overseas customers had it easier — it was just called the Galaxy S .)
At the base level, the US phones shared a few things — each had a 5-megapixel main camera, a 4-inch Super AMOLED display, a 1GHz Samsung-made Hummingbird processor and a 1,500mAh lithium ion battery — but deeper down, customers had to make a decision.
