I see the phone itself as nothing special, really. I already have , so I already own the same basic hardware. The same thing that makes it nothing special is also what makes it so exciting, though. The various folks that build custom ROMs for these devices are also very excited--so much so that they've . I’m hoping with every fiber of my being that this means we'll soon see a custom ROM for Gingerbread on my Captivate. (I currently use Designgear’s Perception Build 7.UGJK3.)

The excitement is almost palpable. One look over at one of the various threads on shows you what I mean. To bring home the point, here’s an I just got via Twitter regarding Android 2.3 already running on a Droid Eris. Before things get too crazy, though, let me explain my original point.

If you bought a Galaxy S phone (on whatever carrier), what you got was Android 2.1 on a fast and beautiful device. Android 2.2 was a huge upgrade, and Samsung made sure to tease about how Froyo was coming “soon”. Months later (in the Captivate’s case) there’s no Froyo to be seen, and the Galaxy S line shipped with a couple of hot issues (GPS was broken, for starters) that Samsung was extremely slow to deal with. It left many customers feeling like Samsung didn’t care about them.

Couple that with phone carriers and their draconian usage contracts and you get some serious resentment from the very customers you live on. For good measure, Samsung released the phone with Touchwiz, an iPhone looking UI for Android that doesn’t even rate against other carriers own bloated UIs (Sense, Motoblur). Just a bad scene.

Until now. The Nexus S has almost the exact same hardware as in other Galaxy S series phones, except it has a front facing camera and . With the Nexus S getting updates as frequently as the Nexus 1 does, there’s very little stopping devs from porting those updates immediately to the Galaxy S line. And that will mean fresh, clean Gingerbread without Touchwiz for everyone and Android updates hot off the wire; I mean, everyone willing to root their devices and install custom ROMs. But, considering how long Galaxy S users have had to wait for a single update to their smartphones, don’t you think at this point customers will be rooting in droves?