Montreal based indie band Metric headlined a free open air concert for the Samsung launch of the Galaxy S Vibrant last night outside Toronto Union Station.
So after leaving my afternoon meeting in downtown Toronto last night, I decided to check out Foursquare for good pubs nearby and noticed that 40 people were trending at “Metric @ Union Station”, a quick Twitter search revealed that they were in fact going to be playing in front of Union Station right under the CN Tower. So I headed back to the hotel to put on some better walking shoes and a fresh shirt and then grabbed my camera and headed down to Union Station just a short walk down Yonge Street and past the past the Hockey Hall of Fame. The closer I got, they more and more people were ogling their phones and muttering about Union Station. I could definitely feel that a Swarm badge would be coming to many of these phones as they turned on to Front Street and got a glimpse of the Samsung stage sitting under the huge shadow of the CN tower. You couldn’t have picked a better venue for a street concert.
By the time I made my way to union station there were at least 500 hipsters and young professionals spilling onto the street and within seconds the concert was suddenly the biggest thing trending on Foursquare in the downtown Toronto area. There were orange polo shirt Samsung folk walking around and showing off the new Galaxy S Vibrant to anyone who would care to look. It is a pretty decent Android 2.1 device, why it isn’t running 2.2 Froyo yet I really don’t understand, but it was a very fast device and the video quality was quite remarkable. The Galaxy S is by far the best attempt of an iPhone “Clone” that I have seen so far. And to be fair to Samsung, they have made huge strides at getting up to speed on their smartphone line. The original Galaxy only ran 1.6 and was a really slow device. The Omnia II was a huge leap forward but relied on Windows Mobile for its OS so you still need a stylus and occasionally had to fiddle around in the start menu to get things to work. The Galaxy S Vibrant is a huge step forwards and hopefully a real winner for them, they sure do through a good party, it’s a shame that hardly any of the phones in the crowd taking pics and recording clip for YouTube were Samsung. The iPhone count still eclipsed any other brand in the crowd including BlackBerries.
Click on to see the slide show of all the concert pics.
