A Long and Winding Road – Rogers Samsung Galaxy S Captivate pre-order live

After many weeks of no new information Rogers has finally announced their pre-order program for the Samsung Galaxy S Captivate. When you pre-order you get a free Bluetooth headset, and there is a contest to win a Samsung 55” TV, Blu-ray player and Camera. The pre-order promotion ends on October 20th, meaning that the release of the phone should be the 21st.

Originally announced by Rogers to be coming ‘soon’ at the beginning of August by, the Captivate’s release date has been unknown until now. As the weeks passed by with no updates from Rogers people vented their frustrations on the Redboard blog. The original Captivate post soon had 518 comments. Adding insult to injury for many Rogers and Samsung then announced that they would be releasing the Samsung Tab Android tablet later in the year, before there was new information about the Captivate’s release date. Pretty soon the comments section of the Tab post was hi-jacked by angry comments about the Captivate.

Finally to top it all off the Rogers website was briefly and accidentally updated with a pre-order page for the Captivate, showing a probably release date of October. This page was quickly taken down, but soon after they did confirm that the phone was now delayed to mid-October – two and a half months after the original announcement!

The reason for this long delay was blamed on unspecified ‘manufacturing ‘ delays. Many have speculated what the delay was caused by, and while many are pointing to a shortage of AMOLED screens (something that has affected availability of other Android phones like the HTC Desire and Incredible) I believe the delay is actually a blessing in disguise. One of the main issues to plague the initial Galaxy S models, including the Captivate available on AT&T in the US, is a GPS performance bug. The OTA update was only just pushed out by Samsung to the US Captivate on September 22nd, and also includes some other updates:

An update to improve the Samsung Captivate’s GPS performance is now available. Captivate customers will receive a notification on their device that an update is available and will simply need to download the file to update their phone. The updates will be pushed to customers’ devices over the next few weeks.

The update for the Captivate will also improve additional device functions, such as media scanning time, add the full version of QuickOffice and address Microsoft Exchange 2003 policy support.

If Samsung was planning on including this update out of the box with Rogers Captivates, the ROM with the fix was probably only completed a few weeks ago at the most. It was only until this ROM was ready that the batch of Captivates destined for Rogers could be manufactured by Samsung. If you take into consideration the shipping time to Canada the mid-October date is understandable. What is frustrating though is that the October release date is very close to Samsung’s projected release of the Android 2.2 update for the Galaxy S phones. It is unlikely that the shipping ROM for the Rogers Captivate will be 2.2 (though Samsung could surprise us!), so let’s hope an OTA update to 2.2 is available at the same time as the other carriers get it.

This explanation of the delay still doesn’t excuse the way that both Rogers and Samsung handled the communication about the Captivate’s release. They must have been aware that the release would be delayed quite some time ago. Better and more frequent updates would have gone a long way to pacifying the frustrated customers. However one thing I cannot condone is the anger that has been vented in the Redboard comments, and on Twitter, to some of the Rogers social media team. As the old saying goes ‘Don’t shoot the Messenger’.

The Rogers Samsung Galaxy S Captivate is $149 on a 3 year term, and you can learn more about the phone here.

You can pre-order your Captivate here.

This article is now feature on the Future Shop Tech Blog here.