The Samsung Captivate has a new Gingerbread build in the works, and as evidence the UCKJ1 build has been leaked for your flashing delight.  While everyone is extolling the virtues of  AT&T’s Galaxy S II, this is great news for folks who are still on that two-year contract they signed about 16 months ago and want to get everything they can out of the OG Galaxy S.  Of course, with a new build comes new custom ROMs as well, so hackers can be happy as well.  The original Galaxy S phones are no slouch with the right software, so this is welcome news!

If you’re a Rogers customer and using a Samsung Captivate, this weekend would be a good time to hook it up to Kies — there’s an update to Android 2.3.3 waiting for you to grab and install.  Reports say that this one doesn’t wipeout all your user data, but it does reset your homescreen(s) configuration, as well as improve Wifi reception and address the mass storage issues a few had with the Froyo update.  Sounds like an awesome tradeoff to me. 

For Samsung Captivate owners it was a struggle just to even get Froyo, let alone Gingerbread but thanks to some leaks — there is now a pair of official-looking Gingerbread 2.3.3 leaks available. Both have different build dates with the later build addressing minor fixes over the older build.

We’ve been seeing serious work on getting the GSM flavors of the Samsung Galaxy S line into the CyanogenMod 7 project for about three months, but now it’s officially official — the Samsung Vibrant, Samsung Captivate, and Samsung Galaxy S i9000 have been merged into the CM7 source tree.  Nightlies are currently building, and should be ready for you to test TDR’s bandwidth very shortly.

My friends, our long national AT&T sideloading nightmare is over, it appears. From the Motorola Backflip to the HTC Aria to the Samsung Captivate — and every phone in between — AT&T locked down its phones so that they could only download apps from the Android Market. Security concerns, don’tcha know. Problem is, there are plenty of legitimate reasons why you might want (and/or need) to sideload. Take the Amazon Appstore, for example. Can’t use it if you can’t install non-Market apps.