Samsung's new Android phone for Sprint comes out swinging with a great AMOLED screen and fast hardware. Find out more in our Samsung Moment review.
Review summary of the Samsung Moment:
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 The Samsung Moment is a solid piece of Android hardware with some specs that put it at the top of the pack. That AMOLED screen, for one, is the best of any Android phone we've seen, and you'll love watching movies or just flicking around the interface on the sharp, rich display. The phone lacks the heavy customization and extra features of other new Android phones, especially the Motorola CLIQ and HTC Hero on Sprint, but the secret to Android is that, if you're willing to do a lot of research and digging through the Android App Market, you can find almost all the features you're missing, often for free. If anything, we miss great video support the most, especially with that large, sharp display, and we'd like to see more apps and widgets to bring our favorite social networking services up to the desktop, and into our address books and calendars. But the Moment is still a solid piece of hardware, and even if it doesn't match the others in interface design, it sets a new bar for speed and hardware features on Android. Release: November 2009. Price: $180.
Pros: Great AMOLED screen makes videos and Web pages look sharp. Android is a highly customizable and extensible OS.
Cons: Very large device. Lacks many necessary apps, though most can be found in Android App Market.
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Full Samsung Moment Review:
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Look and Feel – Good
The first thing you'll notice when you turn on the Samsung Moment is the fantastic, 3.2-inch AMOLED screen. Blacks look rich and tarry on the screen, and colors pop with vibrance. We'd love to see AMOLED tech on every cell phone display, and so far Samsung is leading the charge. The screen looks fantastic in every feature, whether you're watching videos, surfing the Web, or even just navigating the phone's menus. Beneath the screen, there's a small row of touch sensitive buttons for Home, Menu and Back. We always prefer real hardware buttons for navigating the interface, and the touch sensitive buttons on the Samsung Moment weren't sensitive enough. Some times, we had to press more than once to jump back to the home screen.
The second thing you'll notice about the Samsung Moment is that it feels really big. It's almost the same size as the HTC Touch Pro2, itself a massive business device, and as you can see in this chart, it's larger, than any other Android phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. The phone was still comfortable in the hand, but not so much in a tight pants pocket. All that extra space makes room for a 4-row keyboard that slides out sideways from the bottom half.
The keyboard was okay, but Samsung could have done better. Keys were a bit still for typing, and smaller than we like. The keyboard gets a full number row, but we'd like to see more symbols get their own keys, especially the @ symbol. There's a dedicated key for the search feature, and this works contextually, so if you press the Magnifying Glass icon in your address book, you're searching contacts, and if you press in the Web browser, you're searching the Internet. The keyboard layout was also a bit unusual. On the left side, the keys don't line up like they do on a standard keyboard, because the space bar interrupts the bottom row. You'll have to watch what you're typing until you get used to the arrangement. If you don't feel like sliding out the hardware keyboard, Android also comes with a software keyboard that will pop up if you tap a text entry block.
Around the side of the phone, the Samsung Moment has a 2-stage button for the auto focus camera, as well as a dedicated key for voice dialing. We're still waiting for a manufacturer to get adventurous and add media playback keys to an Android device.
The Samsung Moment's interface is fairly basic by Android standards. Unlike the HTC Hero, the interface on the Moment hasn't been tweaked with new graphics or capabilities. But don't let that scare you away. Android is a great interface design, and if the manufacturer doesn't help you along, there are plenty of options available in the Google Android Market to change the look and features of the device. With downloadable apps from the Android Market, you can change the theme of the phone, extend the 3-panel homescreen even further, add widgets and functions to the homescreens and more. More than any other platform, Android allow for deep, easy customization, though you'll have to take some time to explore the various options and rich, crowded App Market.
Calling and Contacts – Very Good
Calls on the Samsung Moment sounded very good. We heard some slight background hiss during a few calls, but for the most part, our conversations came through clean and clear. On our callers' end, friends reported the same, an occasional bit of static but mostly clear voices. The Samsung Moment got pretty good reception on Sprint's network, usually hovering a bar or two below full service. For battery life, we managed a single call that lasted just over 5 hours. That's close to Samsung's estimate of 5.5 hours, though we'd hoped the AMOLED technology would bring some power savings and longer battery life. In a full days use, we never had to recharge the phone, but by suppertime on day 2, our Samsung Moment was begging for juice.
The calling screens and call management features on the Samsung Android come straight from the basic Android playbook. Once we were connected with our friends, it was easy to add another call for a conference, turn on the abusively loud (the way we like it!) speakerphone or swap audio sources to a Bluetooth headset. But the Moment didn't offer up extra information about our callers, like contact info or upcoming calendar dates, like HTC's Sense UI on the Sprint Hero. Voice dialing made calling much easier while driving, and the Samsung Moment uses Nuance's voice dialing app, the best we've used, for speaker-independent dialing, so you won't need to program a raft of voice tags. Finally, the Samsung Moment gets visual voicemail support, and the visual voicemail app on the Moment looks fantastic. You can even send voicemails that you've received to another person as SMS Voice messages.
To get your contacts onto the Samsung Moment, there are a few good options to synchronize with online services. You can sync automatically with your Gmail or your corporate Microsoft Exchange account. If you load up the Android Facebook app, you can create a smart folder on your phone's desktop that brings together all your Facebook contacts, so you can search by name and face and call your friends if they list their phone number on the social network. One thing that's missing is desktop sync. There's no desktop software for Android phones, so if your numbers aren't stored online, you'll have to enter them manually.
Social Networking – Very Good
With its slide-out keyboard and always-on network connectivity, the Samsung Moment could make for a very good social networking device. The Facebook app for Android devices lags behind other platforms, and many features, like browsing photos, simply push you into the phone's Web browser so you can view the mobile Facebook Web site. But the Android browser is top notch, so we didn't mind using the mobile site, though the process slowed us down considerably. If you search the Android Market, you'll find a MySpace app, as well as plenty of options for updating Twitter and other popular social networks. However, the Samsung Moment doesn't have the robust integration with social networks that we've seen on other phones like the Motorola CLIQ or the Palm Pre. Those phones integrate your social networks deeper into the device, letting you synchronize your contacts or calendars with Facebook or other networks. Also, we wish the messaging features on the Samsung Moment were more integrated, like they are on BlackBerry devices, which gather incoming messages from multiple accounts and services into one convenient, easy-to-read inbox. Instead, the Moment has separate apps for every e-mail service and social network to which you subscribe.
To share pictures across your social networks, the Samsung Moment comes with an app that will automatically sign in and upload any pictures you take, as you take them. If you're like us, and you take multiples to get just the right shot, this can be cumbersome, but we still think it's a very cool option and a neat way to share your experience from an event as it happens. You could take pictures from a concert, for instance, and make your friends jealous with regular updates from the show as it happens, all without having to logon and go through the task of uploading pics yourself. Besides Facebook, the Photo and Video Places app lets you automatically upload pictures and videos to YouTube, Photobucket and MySpace, or you can have media sent as an e-mail. Even if you're not automatically uploading your pics, the Samsung Moment gives you plenty of options for sharing pictures from the image gallery, so you can send pics as MMS messages, or send them to various supported apps, like Twidroid for Twitter updates.
Besides these more advanced networking options, the Samsung Moment also supports more basic SMS text messaging and MMS for multimedia messages. Text messages come through in a threaded format, so you can see a whole conversation at once. For instant messaging fans, the Samsung Moment supports AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk. The phone did a fine job keeping us signed into our various accounts while we performed other tasks, like Web browsing or watching YouTube videos.
Multimedia – Very Good
If you like listening to music and watching movies on your phone, the Samsung Moment has the right hardware for the job, but Google Android could still use some help to make the experience much better. As you probably could have guessed from our raving about the Moment's dazzling AMOLED display, videos look especially good on this device. Unfortunately, it was a hassle to get videos onto the device, and it was a hassle to find them once they were loaded. The Samsung moment doesn't support Mass Storage mode, so you can't just plug the phone directly into your computer and sideload your media files, you have to use a card reader. We loaded a batch of video files onto the included 2GB microSD card, but the Moment doesn't have a dedicated video player, at least not an obvious one. Though "Music" gets its own app, videos are played through the photo gallery viewer, which seemed counterintuitive. Once you've found your video files, you can only view thumbnails for them, you don't get to see the actual filenames, which seems silly. Our largest files, created with the H.264 codec, wouldn't play on the phone, even though they should have been supported, but the Samsung Moment had no trouble chewing up a VGA-resolution MPEG-4 videos, and they looked fantastic on the Moment's screen.
For music, you'll still have to use a card reader to sideload music, but the music player gets its own app, and it's an interesting app for music fans. The Android music player lacks some advanced playback controls and sound equalizer settings, but makes up for it with some very cool search features. Once a song is playing, you can hold your finger down on the artist, song title or album name and a menu will pop up offering to search a variety of services. You can find the song on YouTube, buy related music from the Amazon MP3 download store or perform a simple Google Web search. If you load a new application, like the new Google Listen software for podcasts, those apps get added to the search list as well.
Thankfully, Samsung has included a standard 3.5mm headphone jack so you'll be able to listen with your own favorite earbuds, or you can go wireless with stereo Bluetooth support. The speaker on the Samsung Moment is also pretty good for music listening. It was clear and crisp for a tiny phone speaker, so it obviously lacked a solid bass kick, but we had no trouble filling our medium-sized living room with sound from the device.
When you want to show off pictures on your phone's screen, the Android has a photo gallery as well with some basic slideshow features built in. The photo gallery could have been much more touch friendly. Unlike on other touchscreen phones like the Palm Pre or the Apple iPhone 3GS, you don't swipe your finger to see the next pic. Instead, you press an arrow button onscreen. Zooming works the same way, with an onscreen button instead of finger gestures, though we'd prefer the latter.
Business - Good
The Samsung Moment comes loaded with a Work E-mail app from Moxier, the Moxier Mail program. Moxier Mail did a very nice job synchronizing our contacts, calendar and e-mail from our company's Exchange account. We had access to all our subfolders, and the mail app looked good and was easy to use. From the Moxier app, you can perform a local search of all e-mails loaded onto the phone, or search your corporate server for much older e-mails that didn't make the cutoff date. From the calendar on the Samsung Moment, you can create new events for either your personal or corporate accounts, and you can set appropriate reminders and invite attendees as needed.
The Samsung Moment doesn't come with any Office apps pre-loaded, but you can always download software from the App Market. For instance, DataViz' Documents To Go is available for $30, and this app lets you read, edit and even create new Office documents on the device. If you just want to view Office docs that were sent as e-mail attachments, there are plenty of free viewer options available as well, including a free version of DataViz software that only lets you read Word and Excels files.
Traveling – Very Good
To help get you where you're going, the Samsung Moment comes with Sprint Navigator. Among all the carrier supported navigation apps, Sprint Navigator is one of the best looking, and it performed very well in our tests. The Moment found us very quickly, even when our view of the sky was obstructed. You can input an address on Sprint Navigator either by typing or by speaking the address, just as you can with the best versions of VZ Navigator on Verizon Wireless, but unlike Verizon's service, Sprint Navigator requires you phone their server to speak your address, then quit the app while the server updates with your new destination. It's a cumbersome process, and it didn't work when we tested it. Better to just pull over your car and type on the keyboard once you've stopped. Once you have your destination, Sprint Navigator will do a fine job guiding you through your trek, and will update quickly if you find yourself off course.
Once you've arrived, the Samsung Moment comes with Google Maps to help you search your new location, and the Moment gets the great Street View we've enjoyed on other Google Android phones. The Street View combines the normal street level virtual view with the phone's accelerometer and compass. You get a virtual world that you can tour by moving the phone around in space. It's a very cool effect, and we're also seeing the first augmented reality apps show up in the Google Market. One app to try is Layar, which takes images from the camera, combined with GPS and the compass, and overlays information on top of the screen. It's still a fledgling product, so don't expect anything amazing, but it's a cool glimpse of the future.
The Samsung Moment doesn't include such niceties as a tip calculator or currency conversion like you might find on simpler phones, but rest assured that all of these tools and plenty more are available from the Google App Market. You'll find flight tracking software, foreign language translators, subway maps and plenty of other useful apps. In fact, we'd go so far as to say the travel section is one of the most mature and developed parts of the App Market. The most limiting factor might be the phone's carrier. Sprint's network technology works fine across the U.S. and in most of North America, but if you're traveling to Europe or Asia, you might have trouble using your cell phone abroad. The Moment doesn't come with GSM backup radios to use the more common global network standard.
Fun - Good
There are a few game demos and fun apps loaded onto the Samsung Moment, and the App Market again comes through with dozens more. Bejeweled fans get their own demo app, and NASCAR and NFL buffs will find dedicated apps to track their favorite drivers and teams. If you want to watch some television, there's a Sprint TV app to watch streaming videos, and some channels have even pieced together a full episode or two of popular shows. We'd skip the streaming video, though, as the quality was lousy and the selection rather threadbare. Better to load your own movies instead. The Android platform isn't as advanced as the Apple iPhone for gaming, so don't expect the extreme level of graphics and control that you'll find on Apple's devices.
The phone doesn't support Flash in the Web browser, but there is a dedicated YouTube app on board, so it's easy to kill time watching videos online. Video downloads could be slow, even under Wi-Fi, but if you just have to watch "The History of Dance" one more time, the app gets the job done.
For taking pictures on the go, the Samsung Android comes with a 3.2-megapixel, auto focus camera. We appreciate the dedicated button for the camera shutter, this made the auto focus much easier to control. Still, we look forward to the added camera functionality coming in Android 2.0, as the current Android camera control gives you no access to deeper functions like white balance, focal range, ISO sensitivity, etc. The camera is also very, very slow. It's slow to start, and it's slow between shots. We ended up missing opportunities, or taking pictures of random garbage, because of the slow-acting camera. Self portraits were easy enough, thanks to that dedicated button and a mirror around back. But we occasionally blinked through the shot while we waited for the camera to finally take action. Overall, images could be very noisy, especially indoor shots, but some of our pictures looked brilliant with color and deep contrast. Check out our sample images below:
Flower Pot
Soup's On
3 Beans Up Close
Halo Around the Dog
Palm
Self Portrait Indoors, with flash
Little R2 Unit, with flash
Staying Informed – Very Good
The Web browser on the Samsung Moment is the standard Android browser, and it's one of the best on the mobile market. Next to the Apple Safari browser, the Android browser renders pages that look closest like their desktop version. All our favorite pages loaded smoothly, including our own homepage, Google Reader and the New York Times. Navigating pages was also easy. The Android browser uses a sort of accelerating mini map feature to let you browse an entire page with a small zoom window, then automatically jump into the section you want to read. For standard zooming, there are zoom buttons as well, though we would have preferred some gesture control to pinch in and out of a close up view. The Android browser doesn't support Flash, so you'll have to skip sites that rely heavily on the technology.
The Samsung Moment doesn't come with any extra software for reading RSS feeds, though there are plenty of RSS readers available from the App Market. It does include a Weather Channel app and an accompanying widget, so you can check the weather from your home screen without opening the browser. The Sprint TV service even includes CNN, so you can get video news updates if you don't mind the blocky picture.
Price and availability
The Samsung Moment is available from Sprint as of November 1 for $180 with a $100 mail-in rebate and contract agreement.
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