It will certainly catch your eye on the shelf. The Moment, Samsung’s first Android device, has a beautiful AMOLED touch display. And, unlike the HTC Hero on Sprint, this device has a physical keyboard. Priced at $179, the Moment costs a little less than some competitors, but it also lacks the hip, social-networking savvy user interfaces found on Android phones like the Hero and T-Mobile Cliq. At the same time, the Motorola Droid from Verizon Wireless offers the more advanced Android 2.0 software. So is the Moment worth your time?
Design
The first thing we noticed when we unboxed the silver-and-black Samsung Moment was its bulk. Measuring 4.6 x 2.3 x 0.4 inches and weighing 5.7 ounces, it looks and feels brick-like (though it’s a little lighter than the Motorola Droid). That said, it does pack a full QWERTY keyboard underneath the screen.
Our attention quickly turned to the Moment’s beautiful 3.6-inch, 480 x 320-pixel active matrix organic light emitting diode (AMOLED) display, which is brilliant, bright, and colorful. When we showed the Moment to a friend carrying a BlackBerry Tour, he said that he thought his screen had dimmed or was broken. The screen is capacitive touch-enabled, but does not support multitouch gestures like the HTC Hero.
The display is flanked by a glossy black surface with three touch-sensitive buttons: Home, Menu, and Return. Below these are Send and End keys, with a central optical mouse that can be used for navigating through menus. The volume controls are on the left of the phone, and a 3.5mm headphone jack is on the top, although the jack has an unnecessary plastic hatch. The right side of the Moment houses a microUSB charging port, a voice-command quick-launch button, and the camera quick-launch key. The rear cover has a 3.2-megapixel autofocus camera, which includes an LED flash.
Keyboard
The Moment has a full QWERTY keyboard that slides out from below the screen, and it feels sturdy. When the keyboard is open, the screen defaults into landscape mode. We weren’t very fond of typing on the keyboard, however, because it’s laid out in an awkward honeycomb fashion. On most phones, for example, the Q is directly above the A key and the Z key is a bit below and to the right of both. On the Moment, the A key is indented a bit from the Q, and the Z key is actually below and to the left. After a few days we adjusted to the keyboard, but we think it could have been laid out better. The black keys all have a soft white backlight for night-typing, and we appreciated the extra fourth row for numbers.
The Moment also has Android’s mediocre on-screen keyboard for typing out texts one-handed. It’s not as spacious or easy to accurately type on as the keyboard that HTC added to its Hero device on Sprint.
User Interface
The Moment runs Android 1.5, which means it supports homescreen widgets, the ability to record video, and the notifications shade, which you can pull down with a finger swipe to view missed calls, messages, and more. However, the “with Google” tag on the back of the phone typically means that manufacturers don’t have a ton of control over customizing the user interface; Samsung didn’t include its TouchWiz UI on the Moment, and so the device feels a bit bland. Still, Android ran at a snappy pace thanks to the Moment’s zippy 800-MHz processor, and flicks from menu to menu were fluid.
The main menu is home to all of your applications, so there’s very little digging involved to get to what you need. However, with the Hero’s Sense software integration, for example, you have seven home screens to add a host of HTC’s custom widgets. And with the Motorola Cliq’s Motoblur user experience, you can meld your Facebook and Twitter feeds with your address book, and customize up to five home screens. Android offers only three home screens on the Moment, but you can add widgets from apps in the Android Market, such as BBC’s news widget or the Twitter widget from Twidroid.
Samsung hasn’t confirmed whether it will offer Android 2.0 on the phone, but that could drastically change the user experience. The Motorola Droid, which runs Android 2.0, offers an easier way to switch between applications, syncs better with social networks, and sports features like Google’s Maps Navigation (Beta). Android 2.0 also lets you sync more than one Google Account; our biggest gripe with the current version of Android 1.5 is that you can still only sync one account.
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