Samsung Moment

This evening on the way home from work I missed a connecting bus which left me with around thirty minutes to kill while waiting on the next bus to come by so I decided to pop over to the Sprint store on Capitol Blvd. in Raleigh to play with some phones.  Specifically I wanted to get a little more hands on time with the Samsung Moment.  Granted, it was only about twenty minutes with the Android powered smartphone but it gave me a fairly good idea of how the phone operates.

One thing of note is the AMOLED screen.  It is really a beautiful bit of display technology and I can see the wireless industry moving to this over the next couple of years.  It does an excellent job presenting colors and it's a low power consumption part, something very handy in most of the power hungry CPUs found in most smartphones today (the Moment has a CPU running at 800Mhz).  The screen is also a capacitive touch screen and this was one of the failing points I found on the Moment.  It's laggy at times!  Seriously laggy.  Just switching between the three home screens sometime took two or more swipes.  Granted that this was a display device and had been running all day with people coming in opening and closing all sorts of apps.  However, this is just what I would be doing on a daily basis and it makes me wonder if it's a symptom of the hardware of the software.

I had about two weeks of hands on time with with the HTC Hero back in November which was running the same version of Android, 1.5, that the Moment runs but also had the SenseUI custom overlay by HTC along with a slower CPU (524Mhz) but didn't seem as laggy as the Moments screen.

The slide-out QWERTY keyboard on the Moment is both nice and a pain at the same time.  It's got a lot of nice spacing between the keys while the keys themselves have a nice feel to them, something like a rubbery/plastic feel that is nice to type with.  The issue I had was the layout.  The space bar is between the V and B keys.  Awkward is an apt description.

I really didn't do more than launch a few apps and browser a couple of websites to get an idea of the workings of the phone.  Maybe with some of the many options to customize individual Android powered phones via the App Store this might be a more interesting phone.  As it stands right now I don't know if I'd be willing to give up my Pre for it.

Might Need An Intervention

Somehow I knew that this was going to happen.  I don't care how many times I said I wouldn't go down this path again I knew I would.

I'm looking at smartphones again!

It's not my fault!  I blame Sprint!  it's all fault!!! 

See, Sprint gives me "new" customer pricing on equipment annually and my annual date is coming up in a week.  And the phones, they are a callin' my name!

I want a new Android phone the way a junkie craves his latest fix.  The problem is that I'm not entirely thrilled with the two choices that are currently available on Sprint right now:  the HTC Hero and Samsung Moment.  On the one hand I got the chance to play with the Hero last year for a couple of weeks so I'm fairly familiar with that phone and it does have some enticing features.  However, I can't get past the fact it has the same old 528Mhz CPU that just isn't really powerful enough to do justice to the SenseUI that HTC has laid on top of the plain vanilla Android interface.  If it was running a Snapdragon 1Ghz CPU I'd snap it up on February 1st (the day I can grab a new phone at new customer pricing).  The Moment has a faster, 800Mhz, CPU but it is running plain jane Android.  That isn't an entirely bad thing, per say, but it has it's own issues from what I've been reading on the internet.  That and to get the latest update to the phone software you have to schlep the thing into a Sprint service center to get the update installed rather than an over-the-air or via PC update.  That plain sucks!  However, both are slated to be updated to Android 2.1 in the first half of 2010.

Both of those phones, as well as my Palm Pre, have a 240x320 screen resolution and right now that just feels dated as all get out.  Most of the new Android handsets coming out have a higher resolution.  I've used the HTC Touch Diamond before and it ran a higher resolution display and I do miss that.  Things just look sharper under a higher resolution and web browsing is much nicer.  Did I mention I miss that higher resolution?  Of course I could get a HTC Touch Pro 2 but that would mean going back to Windows Mobile and that is just something I'm not too thrilled about.  That and going back to a resistive rather than capacitive touch screen would really suck.  But it does have a nice screen and from what I've read the TouchFLO3D interface has been improved significantly on that device.  But it's Windows Mobile!  On the upside, there are a lot of programs for Windows Mobile and I've got a lot of them still on backup disk so there is that.

What I'll probably end up doing is heading to a Sprint store and check out all three of those phones to see if one "grabs" my attention.  There is the Mobile World Congress coming up in a few weeks and there should be some announcements for Sprint coming out of that but there were also supposed to be some "big" announcements for Sprint coming out of CES a few weeks ago and that was pretty much a bust.

The problem for me is that it's looking like there won't be any thing great coming out for Sprint before the second half of this year.  Everything I've found online is pointing to that sort of time frame for new devices that I would be interested in coming out.  That's just too long to wait.

Based on what's coming out on other networks such as the Nexus One on T-Mobile (and in March on Verizon) I would be very tempted to jump ship at this point.  However, I recently added a second line to my Sprint account for my mother and that leaves me stuck for two years.  Of course there is the option to eat the Early Termination Fee at some point if the situation doesn't improve soon (six months or so) and jump ship then.  From what I've been reading at Sprintusers.com there are a LOT of other people feeling the same way and that can't be a good thing as that is a "fan" site of the company.

Even if I do get another phone "right now" I'll still hang on to my Palm Pre if for no other reason than to have a back up phone for those "just in case" situations.  I used to have two backup phones until I paid full price for the Pre when it came out in June and had to sell them off to pay for it.  I could do the same thing in this situation if it came down to it.

It's really all coming down to how patient I am (not very) and whether or not one of those three phones I mentioned earlier really grab my attention when I go play with them (probably this afternoon).