What is your general feedback on the Fascinate?

I'll mention all the worst bits:

First, straight out of the box, I had the Kies connecting issue, what a hell that was. After hours of searching and trying to solve it, I ended up wiping my SD card, taking it out the sd card, uninstalling the drivers from device manager, downloading the latest kies and finally making it work.... just to find out: No update (Bought mine in Norway, firmware I9000XWJFB)

Later I was using an application to view a podcast I like, while charging the battery (because battery was low). My I9000 got so hot, I got a warning message that "battery temperature is too high" and it stopped charging. Didn't like that too much.

Next, the live wallpapers. I love them, but the ones I like (like dandelion and quads) aren't as smooth performance wise as I'd like, and sometimes make switching between home screens choppy. I find that kind of weird on a 1Ghz processor with 512mb ram. I use advanced task killer (ATK), so I'm sure I don't have any background processes running too, odd thing is though, ATK says I only have 107M available memory when no apps are running! Does android and touchwiz use the remaining 400?

Then there's video
I thought "finally, a device I don't need to go through conversion hell with". Wrong. No matter what video I try, it gives me "sorry, this video cannot be played" (or I download apps that can play them, with horrible performance or force close bugs).
The support for avi is nonexistant, I've yet to find an .avi movie on my hd that it can play. Where do you guys get your videos from? I honestly can't be bothered converting every show and movie I want to play on this device. And what resolution, quality and fps can it handle before it gets choppy?

The camera.... What a letdown! The focus on it misses half the time on closeup shots (my lens isn't dirty at all), and the colors are really odd indoors. Here's a pic I took today of my colleagues getting their hands on some iPhone 4s (I sell phones and gps devices). The store is pretty well lit up, but the i9000 gave it some odd pinkish hue nonetheless! http://i30.tinypic.com/m83g9y.jpg
It's only good for outdoor shots on sunny days with the sun behind you (because the camera also picks up sun glare like a motherf***)

Last but not least, the android market.
I live in Norway, we don't have access to paid apps here yet, so the selection is extremely limited. And due to the fact that Android runs (like windows) on several different hardware configurations, the apps are often buggy or aren't tweaked to the I9000 hardware!


Conclusion:
Great piece of hardware, but horrible piece of software/firmware.

Major drawbacks: Samsung Kies, Android Market, camera, horrible firmware


The Samsung Fascinate has plenty of room to grow, I've flashed mine to 2.2 and I'm pretty happy with it at the moment, but it's not a phone for the everyday man, you definitely need to flash it to get the most out of it. If you want a polished phone that works great straight out of the box, go for the iPhone 4. The I9000 will get up to par late september when it gets the 2.2 update from samsung and android market opens up for all!

I am  not up with all the flash things that are on offer on the Fascinate but I like the phone, I just wish it had a text counter already built in.  I wish I could have any ringtone I wanted for my text message alert and its all such a nightmare to convert especially when your like me and it dont seem to go to plan.

I have noticed that the battery doesnt last a full day if I go on the internet and found myself y'day buying an in car charger so that I can be safe when I am on a journey somewhere cus would hate to find myself without any charge left.

Shell

Yeah you did tell me about a SMS counter but I cant seem to find it on the applications somehow i must be doing wrong.
xx

I have owned 5 smartphones now and I can say without a doubt that the Fascinate is the best.  Of the five I have owned I would rank them in this order.

1. Fascinate
2. Nexus 1
3. My Touch 3G
4. Iphone 3GS
5. Blackberry Curve

I have not had any of the issues reported by others. My Kies has worked flawlessly, GPS finds my position within seconds and is very accurate.  I could not be any happier.

What I like about the Fascinate (Samsung Vibrant):
4" Super-AMOLED display
Large internal memory
Camera takes quality pictures
Very lightweight
Very fast -- Ive never experienced any lag on this device
Swype -- Love how you can choose to type old school or using swype without changing any settings.

Things I dont like:
GPS & Compass -- Both are broken.  Samsung urgently needs to fix this ASAP.
Lack of LED indicator -- Even an On screen indicator would do
Lack of trackball/trackpad -- In text input fields this isnt so bad because you can Swype+Sym to bring up virtual 4way directional cursor, but selecting text off a webpage is much harder without trackball/trackpad.
Signal Bars -- Meaningless,  One second I can have full 5 bars, next 0 bars. 
Personally prefer the vanilla android OS, touchwiz unnecessarily removes some features, looking forward to cyanogenmod to eliminate touchwiz


Overall I think this phones Pro's outweigh the cons.  The 4" display is nothing short of gorgeous, and its speed is second to none.  I think the size of the display and phone body is the perfect size, not to big or small.  The phones light weight and slim profile are definitely appealing.  Sadly after that it starts to go downhill.  Samsung shipped the phone out with faulty GPS & Compass, a major selling point for many people.  Signal bars are all over the place whereever Im at.  It feels like Samsung rushed this phone out with very little testing.  I did not pay a hefty price to beta-test a companies product.  While I believe a lot of these issues can be fixed via software updates, its still disconcerting such glaring issues were not caught in testing. 

As far as overall construction of the phone goes I feel like it is plenty durable.  Its very lightweight but could leave the impression its made of lower quality material.  There are some aspects of the design I do not like such as the gap between outside band and the indented glass.  It is just wide enough that hair and small debris can get lodged in it.  Having experience with HTC phones; G1, N1, Hero, one thing Ive noticed is their build quality is superb, something I admire about HTC phones.