First Impressions of Samsung Moment (Android Phone)

I attended CTIA last week, and was at the Sprint event, where they announced their first Android phone.  It is made by Samsung, and will be called the "Moment".  I was very impressed with my initial impressions of it. At the event, they were not allowing people to handle the phone, and hired pretty women to demo the phones.  The women clearly didn't know anything about the phones, but were accommodating to the attendees, and would press any buttons, and show us whatever we wanted.  I apologize for the poor quality of the images, I took them with my G1, which has less than stellar photo performance.

The form factor of this phone is the classic slider design.  I found it well executed.  The phone was large enough to be useful, but still thin enough to easily fit in a pocket.  There were also some nice chrome accents on the phone, for a little bling.

I made sure to test the keyboard, as this is super important to me.  I did some typing on it (again, while the pretty girl made sure she kept an iron grip on the device), and found the keyboard great.  The keys were spaced well, and had good response.  An interesting feature that the Moment had, was haptic feedback when keys were pressed (ie. the phone vibrated slightly when keys were activated).  While I personally would probably turn this off, this is an innovation.

Another interesting feature of the Moment, is that it is the first Android phone to use a different a chip than the Qualcomm MSM7201A.  Samsung is using their own ARM11 chipset clocked at 800 MHz.  I would expect this will result in improved performance.

The phone does have an AMOLED screen, but quite frankly, it didn't look any better to me than the screen on my G1 (maybe the lighting in the hall was bad or something).

Samsung and Sprint are releasing the phone without any custom skinning, or other significant features on top of Android.  I asked the girl to navigate to the about screen, and noticed that the demo phone was running the 1.5 release of the OS (even though Eclair - ie. 1.6, had dropped already).   Following up on this on the intrawebs, it does sound like they will be updating this before they officially release the phone.

The last compelling feature of this phone worth mentioning, is that the camera has a flash (which you may be able to see in my blurry picture).  This is a great inclusion, and not something I have seen on any of the other currently released Android phones (but a feature I think should be on all phones).

Overall, on first impression, I really liked this phone.  The form factor and keyboard were great.  Samsung has included some advanced features (AMOLED screen, faster processor, camera flash, haptic feedback)  that should make this phone standout from the other Android phones.  It is a compelling device, and a great first Android phone for both Samsung and Sprint.