I used practically the same terms to express my frustrations in badaforum:
Your Experience with Samsung Kies - Samsung Kies - 3
Your Experience with Samsung Kies - Samsung Kies - 3
Well, having written operating systems, comms programs and a host of other stuff .. and managed embedded and PC software development for more than 20 years .. I can't believe just how bad Kies is. It is, as you say, atrociously slow and it's very unreliable. Frankly there doesn't really seem to be anything that it does satisfactorily. I'm running it on an almost stock XP Pro install on a laptop device that has very few additional drivers loaded ..mainly because it simply won't connect to my SGS on my normal XP desktop, though all my other Nokia, HTC, 3rd party backup et al software work just fine.
I've just been through 4 iterations of it telling me there's an update and then proceeding to bomb out of the download, leave the splash screen process still running and start up again.. and tell me again that there's an update available. It really is appalling and frankly I'd be embarrassed to release junk like this.
I wonder too why the might of Samsung couldn't manage to put a complete device image backup into this software? Surely most users would like to have a complete backup image saved in the event of a dead device or corrupted flash memory..and a simple way to recover that to the same (and preferrably a replacement) device. Windows desktop and mobile users have had that for years! Moving software licences is always a bit of a pain if a device has to be replaced but it's a lot easier than rebuilding the whole thing.
Between Kies and the incredilbly unreliable GPS I'm beginning to wonder about my Galaxy S purchase. The basic device is fantastic(that screen!) but it begins to feel like they aren't really that bothered about quality in any other area. Begins to make me wonder about the Samsung LED TV I've been looking at as well...maybe Sony would be a better bet!