We check out AT&T's new touchscreen slider. Did the AMOLED screen burn its way into our memory? Find out in our in-depth Samsung Impression review.
Review summary of the Samsung Impression:
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 The Samsung Impression is probably the most advanced feature phone in AT&T's current lineup, and its one of the few phones on the markets with the brilliant, colorful AMOLED screen technology. For calling, media playback and even Web browsing, we found the apps to be very touch friendly, though not too advanced. The keyboard is a nice addition, but the phone lacks most of our favorite messaging options. Mostly, we wish that there were better video playback options to truly take advantage of the impressive screen. Still, the phone was fun to use, and some features came through for us. The camera was better than we expected, and pictures looked great on the 3.2-inch display. Also, GPS performance was good, and we liked being able to geotag those pics. Overall, the Samsung Impression is the best feature phone we've tried on AT&T, but we wish the carrier would go farther with messaging and Web browsing options and let these feature phones live up to their full potential. Release: April 2009. Price: $80.
Pros: AMOLED screen is among the best in class. Very good calling features, including great call handling.
Cons: Web browser disappointing. Multimedia could have been better, especially transfer software. Lacks good, modern messaging options. Screen would occasionally register false clicks.
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Full Samsung Impression Review:
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Design – Very good
The Samsung Impression at first seems like a Samsung Eternity, this time with a slide-out keyboard. In fact, there's more to the story. The Samsung Impression's most interesting feature might be its screen. The 3.2-inch, 240 by 400 pixel display might pack the same real estate as the screen on the Eternity, but the Impression uses an AMOLED. This newer technology is a bit brighter with darker blacks, which results in rich colors and a deep contrast. It's a great screen, and it stood out from every other phone we have on hand. The touchscreen was also very responsive, and we liked the haptic feedback that vibrates every time you tap the display. Like most Samsung touchscreens, the Samsung Impression did have a flaw where the screen would register a tap at the beginning or end of a swiping gesture. This was annoying, especially on lists like our contacts page or our music library. But even the TouchWIZ interface, which uses a scrolling bar of widgets on the side of the screen, was affected by this errant clicking.
As for that TouchWIZ interface, we've never been fans of the widget-based home screen (to check out our comparison of recent TouchWIZ phones, click here). Samsung just doesn't provide enough pixels to make room for the widgets, and with more than one or two open, the home screen becomes a useless jumble. Otherwise, the interface is top notch. The main menu is a simple icon grid, but it reacts very quickly to the touch. Throughout the phone, from the media player to the calling screens, the interface is very touch friendly and shows a lot of polish. We just think its time to ditch the TouchWIZ home screen, before its too late.
Calling - Good
Calls made from the Samsung Impression sounded pretty good over AT&T's HSDPA network. Calls were generally clear on both ends, and at worst our callers reported a slightly digitized sound on our voices, but nothing serious. The calling interface on the Samsung Impression is fantastic. It was easy to make multiple calls, and we managed a 4-party conference call with a few clicks, splitting and joining the calls in various permutations. With such a clean, intuitive interface, it's a shame that a few of our favorite features were missing. First, visual voice mail would be an obvious fit for this phone. Second, the Samsung Impression, like the Samsung Eternity, lacks any voice dialing option. We've seen voice dialing on other TouchWIZ phones, so why not on AT&T's models?
The keypad on the touchscreen could have been a bit larger. That would be our only complaint with the calling interface. If you open the keypad, you can dial with the hardware keys, but we think there is room for a larger numeric keypad on the touchscreen. Battery life on the phone was also disappointing. We managed a call that was more than 3.5 hours, which beats Samsung's 3 hour estimate. But even those results seemed low, and we always like to get at least 5 hours of talk time, if not more.
Otherwise, the phone was solid for calling features. The speaker phone was adequate, though not quite loud enough, and easily accessible from the calling screens. The contact list had plenty of fields for a basic multimedia phone, but this was still less than we would have liked. The Samsung Impression ships with Samsung's PC Studio software. We were disappointed that there was no way to synchronize this phone with our Outlook contacts (and calendars) through PC Studio. Nokia has similar software for their S60 phones, but Nokia's version offers deeper sync options beyond simple multimedia (to check out Nokia's Symbian S60 phones on AT&T, click here).
Messaging – Good
For such a high-end feature phone with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, the Samsung Impression comes up surprisingly short in messaging features. We blame AT&T, as the carrier is using the same basic, dated messaging apps on this phone as we've seen on just about every non-smartphone. The basics are all present and accounted for. If you prefer AOL, MSN or Yahoo, you're in luck, as the phone supports those services for instant messaging and e-mail with no trouble. But if you prefer Gmail or Google Talk, or if you want a phone with easy access to your social networking sites, the Samsung Impression comes up short. There was no way to set up our own e-mail account, and no option to access, say, Facebook or Twitter beyond the simple Web interface.
For typing, the slide out keyboard on the Samsung Impression appeared to be large enough, but we still had trouble. The top row of keys butts up against the top row of the slide, and we missed keys much more often if they were in the QWERTY row. The keys were still plenty large, so once we got used to hitting those top letters, things got better. If you don't feel like opening the keyboard, the Impression has a respectable onscreen keyboard, too, with a wide landscape or portrait mode. Still, when our typing was really up to speed, the Impression occasionally had trouble keeping up and registering every tap.
Multimedia - Good
The Samsung Impression has a simple media player. It may lack features, but it uses large, friendly buttons that were easy for touching. We've mentioned our problem scrolling through lists, and this affected our music browsing, but music played well on the phone, and it was smart enough to recognize all of our music files.
We wish Samsung would abandon the proprietary connector. It makes music listening more difficult, since the proprietary connector requires an adapter to use our own headphones, and no adapter or earbuds are included. When it came time to synchronize the Impression with our PC, it would have been much easier to grab a standard microUSB cable than Samsung's proprietary USB connector.
We synchronized music to the Samsung Impression using the Samsung PC Studio software. It's a confusing, buggy piece of software that doesn't come close to the iPhone / iTunes combo, and wasn't even as intuitive or helpful as Windows Media Player. For videos, we simply dragged our test videos to the phone's memory in Mass Storage mode, and the Impression was smart enough to find all our clips, even the ones it couldn't play.
For video, we had high expectations, considering that dazzling AMOLED screen. AT&T's Cellular Video streaming service looked surprisingly good on the Samsung Impression's screen. It wasn't quite up to par with the best Mobile TV content we've seen, but we were disappointed with the mobile TV performance on the Samsung Eternity, so perhaps the video here is comparable.
We also loaded up some MP4 test clips. Though the Impression has a 240 by 400 video resolution, it couldn't play clips formatted to that size. It could only play QVGA clips, which it would present stretched or window paned. These looked okay, but still had a blocky quality. Color looked good, but the compression was obvious. It's possible the high-quality screen actually reveals the flaws of the low-resolution video.
Web browsing - Good
The Samsung Impression browses the Web on a very fast network, so pages loaded in a hurry, most of the time. Unfortunately, Samsung has cheaped out on the browser a bit. While the Samsung Instinct S30 on Sprint will get an Opera browser, the Samsung Impression gets a more basic Web experience. The browser can render full HTML pages, though not completely accurately. Graphics could come through a bit jagged looking, and text layout wasn't perfect. A high-end messaging phone like this should have a more impressive Web browser.
Camera - Good
We were actually fairly pleased with the images we got from the Samsung Impression. Pictures weren't perfect, but they looked better than on most camera phones we try. Under good outdoor lighting, we saw nice, accurate colors and plenty of detail. Light could glare at points, but overall the pictures were pretty good. We wish the camera had an auto focus and a flash. Especially on such a nice touchscreen, we'd like to see some touch focus features and other high end camera options. Instead, we get a panorama mode that didn't quite work perfectly, and a smile shutter that was too slow to catch a quick grimace.
Flowering Tree
Structures at Lake
Lakeside Steps
Bright Self Portrait
Panorama
Overall, there are some nice details in the samples. In the first image, the camera catches plenty of the individual flowers and the mesh of branches in the background. The woodgrain in the second is also pleasing. In our self portrait, the bright light harshes our face, but details in our dark shirt are nearly noiseless, and the background is clean. The panorama disappoints not only in its small size, but also in the crooked building on the right and slight mismatches. Still, Samsung gets credit for an easy, automatic panorama mode that captures multiple shots as you slowly pan the camera.
GPS – Very good
We tried the turn-by-turn navigation services on the Samsung Impression, provided by AT&T Navigator, which is a TeleNav product. Navigation was swift and satisfying on this phone. The interface could be a bit more touch friendly, and the simpler phone-based navigation app can't compete with the more thorough, intuitive portable navigation devices. Still, we were impressed with the speed at which the GPS sensor found us, and it tracked us smoothly on our trip from New York City to suburban Maryland. We also liked the geotagging ability tied to the phone's camera. We tagged our photos with coordinates, and when we uploaded them to Flickr later from our PC, we were able to place our shots on a map.
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