Review of Samsung's Moment for Sprint - AMOLED and Android meet

Samsung m900 Moment

Samsung m900 Moment

Samsung m900 Moment

Samsung m900 Moment

The Samsung SPH-m900 Moment for Sprint is a device with a few firsts to its credit. It is the first Android based smartphone to be offered by Samsung in the United States, and it is the first device with an AMOLED^(INFO) display to be offered by Sprint.

Those two things alone make it an interesting device. The addition of a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and an autofocus 3.2 megapixel camera with a flash simply raised my curiosity level. The question is, with hot Android devices from HTC and, more recently, Motorola hitting the market, how good will Samsung's effort stack up? Read on to find out.

Physical Aspects

At first blush, the Samsung Moment looks quite similar to any number of other Samsung touchscreen equipped devices that have been sold by U.S. carriers over the past year and a half. It has rounded edges and corners, a silver front face, and a soft-grip rear cover. The phone is fairly thick, measuring 117mm x 60mm x 16.5mm (4.6in x 2.4in x .6in), and it weighs a hefty 166g (5.9oz). It's comfortable to hold in the hand, but its design lacks any sort of eye-catching traits.

Until the display turns on, at least. The 3.2-inch half-VGA touchscreen uses AMOLED^(INFO) technology, which sets it apart from any other phone sold by Sprint so far. AMOLED displays generally offer more saturated colors and higher contrast ratios than LCD displays. In the Moment's particular case, its AMOLED is not the most impressive I've seen on a Samsung device, but it is still quite nice. The capacitive touchscreen^(INFO) layer that sits atop the AMOLED screen works quite well, and the combination of the two will impress most folks.

In my opinion, the first major weakness in the Samsung Moment is its slide-out 4-row QWERTY keyboard. The rubbery keys feel cheap, and the space bar does not work well at all (as you can see in the video below). Samsung and Sprint chose to dedicate one entire row of the keyboard to number keys, which is a mistake in my mind. Because of that decision, the bottom row of alphabetic keys gets mangled by the previously mentioned space bar, which sits between the V and B keys where it doesn't belong. There are many smartphones on the market today with fine keyboards. The Moment just isn't one of them.

At least the action of the keyboard's slider mechanism is good, and it does offer some dedicated arrow keys, as well. Many people will probably opt to use the optical d-pad controller instead, however. It works decently, though seems a bit overly sensitive at times. The touch sensitive home, menu, and back keys that sit between it and the display work surprisingly well, and the plain looking call send and end/power keys have a nice feel, too.

It just seems to me that Samsung was not inspired when it designed the Moment for Sprint. I really like the display, but the generic look of the device doesn't tug at the right heart strings, and the keyboard left me feeling entirely underwhelmed.