Samsung Captivate Glide

Samsung Electronics
Industry	Consumer electronics, Telecommunications
Founded	March 1, 1938; 88 years ago in Daegu, South Korea
Headquarters	Suwon, South Korea
Products	Smartphones, tablets, consumer electronics
Website	www.samsung.com

Adapted from the English Wikipedia article Samsung Captivate Glide, available under CC BY-SA 4.0Updated 9 August 20253 sources

Template:Infobox mobile phone

The Samsung Captivate Glide (model SGH-i927) in the United States market and marketed as the Samsung Galaxy S Glide (SGH-i927R) in Canada,^[1] represents Samsung's first Galaxy S series smartphone featuring a physical QWERTY keyboard running the Android platform, released for AT&T in the US and Rogers Wireless in Canada.^[2]^[3]

Although its name references the original Galaxy S line's Captivate model, the Glide actually belongs to the Galaxy S II family of devices from Samsung. It differentiates itself from the flagship Galaxy S II by incorporating a slightly smaller Super AMOLED display utilizing a PenTile pixel arrangement similar to that found in the initial Galaxy S model. Additionally, it is powered by a Nvidia Tegra 2 processor clocked at 1 GHz and offers internal storage of 8 GB instead of the standard 16 GB found on the Galaxy S II flagship device.

Availability

The Samsung SGH-i927 was officially distributed solely within the United States and Canada. In the US, the device is offered at a subsidized price but is network-locked to AT&T when purchased through their service plans. The front panel of the phone prominently features the AT&T logo. Conversely, the Canadian version is also subsidized yet locked to Rogers network under their contract offerings, although the device itself does not display any Rogers branding on its exterior.

Outside of these two countries, Samsung has not authorized retail sales of this model. Nevertheless, both US and Canadian variants can be acquired—either locked or unlocked—at full retail cost from various vendors and subsequently exported globally. Once unlocked, these units are compatible with GSM networks worldwide, allowing international use.

Software

This handset originally came with Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread) pre-installed. In September 2012, AT&T rolled out an update to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) through Samsung Kies. However, this upgrade contained several bugs: a Quality Control oversight caused the hardware keyboard backlight to stop functioning, alongside issues involving the lock screen and multiple phone-related functions within the operating system. Due to these problems, Samsung temporarily suspended the update to address and resolve these defects. On November 10, a revised version of the Ice Cream Sandwich update was released, incorporating fixes that remedied the earlier errors.

Rooting and unofficial development

On December 5, 2011, members of the xda-developers community successfully obtained root access for this device and published detailed instructions on how to achieve it. Since then, various widely-used custom recovery tools—including ClockworkMod and TWRP—have been developed for the SGH-i927. Additionally, several stable custom ROMs exist that allow upgrading the phone's software to Android 4.4.4 KitKat, with many of these KitKat-based projects still actively maintained.

AT&T variant

The ROM installed on AT&T models includes carrier-imposed restrictions preventing users from manually switching between 2G, 3G, or 4G network bands—a feature that can help conserve battery life by allowing a downgrade to 2G frequencies. These limitations can be bypassed either by entering specific service commands or by rooting the device and installing ROMs that do not enforce such constraints. Initially, this variant came equipped with Carrier IQ monitoring software; however, it is believed that an update to Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread (I927UCKL1) removed this software component.

Rogers Edition

The ROM variant provided by Rogers does not impose such limitations and additionally supports SMS delivery confirmation. It seems that the ICS (Android 4.x) upgrade has yet to be released for the SGH-i927R variant, which runs on different firmware compared to the AT&T versions. The Canadian Rogers model, SGH-i927R, is reportedly devoid of Carrier IQ.