rickhamilton620
has a fetish for terrible cars
But even the GSM version hasn't been announced in North America, not sure if you being on Verizon has anything to do with it.
I posted some thoughts on the SGSII here. Yes, it's not made of metal, it's got no notification LED and Samsung are stupid for ripping off Apple when they haven't the need to do so. But it's perfect otherwise.
I can't remember the last time I bought a new electronic that felt as zippy as this phone does running on the Exynos SoC (this includes my new i7 computer and Tegra 2 tablet). I've had the Samsung about 12 days now and everything still feels buttery smooth... and I really mean that, animations and stuff flow so smoothly it's incredible.
I would have preferred a slightly more weighty chassis; a dedicated camera shutter; all capacitive buttons instead of having the home button be a physical one just to match the iPhone; and that lack of a notification LED, though it was just something to consider for me and not an outright bother like it seems it is for many people here.
One thing I was surprised by is that I actually kind of like TouchWiz. In fact I might even prefer it over Sense because aside from the launcher, Samsung has only added stuff that needed to be added in... TouchWiz 3.0 looks more like vanilla Gingerbread that Sense 3.0 which goes a lot further in changing Android.
But I'm still looking to get rid of TouchWiz, it has one feature I cannot stand which is the app drawer they ripped off the iPhone. I find it very annoying because it lists apps by order in which they were installed and lets you manually sort them instead of doing them by the alphabet itself.
Interesting stuff. Verizon was the last of the "big 4" US carriers to get a Galaxy S phone with the Fascinate. I'm hoping they wont do a repeat performance with Galaxy S II.
I guess not having a light's not too bad since there are workarounds, I'm just used to being able to look at a glance w/out needing to turn on the screen, or if I'm IMing in bed and get lazy and let the screen turn off...i can relax knowing that the light will blink and get my attention.
The reason you like (err...don't mind) TouchWiz is why I like it, as well as Motorola's latest MAP skin to a lesser extent. It's far less "weighty" visually than Sense, and I prefer the animations and scrolling kinetics on a TouchWiz phone over Sense. The optional update to the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is even more lightweight. One wouldn't be able to tell they were using a modified version of Honeycomb at first glance unless they were enthusiasts or saw a competing tablet that wasn't skinned right beside the Tab.
In the app drawer, you can change it to scroll list style. Hit menu while your in there to see sorting and display options.