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@Emyr
My phone was delivered with a mediocre build of Android 2.1 assembled by Samsung and Orange.
Samsung's Kies tool, which is like a knock off of iTunes, recognised the presence of my phone when connected using the USB cable (I did not share the woes described in the rant above) however it always informed me that no upgrade existed for my particular device, despite other Samsung Galaxy S owners on the Orange network having reported successfully upgrading.
I therefore used the more technical Odin tool to install Samsung and Orange's build of Android 2.3, colloquially known as Gingerbread. This tool carries more risks however I never experienced any failures.
More recently, I have installed a build of Android 4.0, which carries the Ice Cream Sandwich moniker, prepared my a community of geeks led by an ubergeek who goes by the pseudonym Cyanogen. Their builds are dubbed CyanogenMod, and version 9 is their first Android 4 build. The Alpha suffix indicates that the build is still under intensive development for my particular device and may not be suitable for daily use by those who would find bugs unacceptable.
Having used the 12th Alpha version of CyanogenMod 9 for the Galaxy S, the only shortcoming I have experienced is an occasional inaccuracy in the location indicated by the GPS subsystem. Rob, the often drunk polo player who posts at LFGSS under the name Snottyotter, has the 14th Alpha version installed on his Galaxy S, but his GPS problems are attributable to a fault in the GPS chip which was common in the early batches of the Galaxy S.
I thus refute the besmirching of Samsung's reputation as a producer of Android handsets.