GAOSP: Samsung Galaxy (i7500) Android Open Source Project is a project by a dude that calls himself "Drakaz".
This software is truly a huge improvement over the standard (crappy) android version that Samsung delivers.
Some highlights:
- battery now lasts 32 hours including gaming, calls, app updates, etc!
- dutch language support for navigation
- froyo features such as "Car Home", improved messaging, improved browser, more apps!
- much snappier GUI somehow, the memory management is better (this phone is very low on RAM)
- many little tweaks are in the core system (modded), for which I used to install a whole range of apps before
- rooted and a "sudo" like privilege lifting system, to allow for example to remove the default music app that used to be really annoying (I blame google for that crap)
Installing it was not really that hard, though a lot of reading was involved to understand what steps exactly to take.
Basically all that was needed was:
- install the google android sdk package on my laptop
- get adb to actually list my phone on linux (part of the sdk that links to the phone)
- use adb to copy the image and a thing called "recovery" to the phone
- use "fastboot" (a utility by htc) to install the recovery on the recovery partition of the phone
- boot in recovery mode by pressing some buttons
- choose backup from a nifty little menu to backup current image
- choose install to get the awesome new superpowers of GAOSP froyo!
Oh yeah, in this beta 3 release, there is still one little snag with bluetooth headsets. This means my car kit does not work, which sucks. But still, the rest is so much better that I'm happy to use my phone on speaker for a while until the bluetooth part is fixed again.
