Hands-on with the Android-powered Samsung Moment

@grg / 11:51 am PDT • October 7, 2009

Oh man – we just got to spend a bit of time with the just announced Samsung Moment. Hardware-wise, it’s stolen the crown as my favorite Android device. It’s a bit basic on the software end — it’s Android, straight up, with no apparent major modifications — but we really, really dig the hardware.

Check after the jump for our early impressions and pictures. This page will be updated as we add new notes.

With a nice big 3.2″ AMOLED screen and a slide out keyboard, it’s certainly not the slimmest device. It feels a bit big in the hand – but not overly huge
Though we only got to spend all of 5 minutes with it, I loved the keyboard. It blows the keyboard on other Android handsets I’ve used out of the water.
The 3.2″ AMOLED screen is absolutely gorgeous. Being that it’s AMOLED, we can only assume that it’ll suck something terrible in the sunlight – but indoors, under the florescent lights of the San Diego Convention Center, it shined.
Software wise, it’s all pretty stock. The model we tested was using Android v1.5, Cupcake. The final model will be on v1.6, otherwise known as Donut. Unlike the Samsung Behold II announced yesterday (also Android powered), Samsung didn’t throw TouchWiz onto this one. There are no major UI modifications, as far as we could tell.
The optical sensor that serves as the D-pad seemed a bit strange at first, but I had no issues with it. Unlike the Omnia, which also had an optical mouse, there is no mouse cursor onscreen here. It’s purely used for directional movements (such as jumping from text input to text input) as far as we could tell.
The only thing that I didn’t like about the hardware were the touch-sensitive buttons below the screen. While they look great, these buttons (home, back, menu) are too commonly pressed to not have physical buttons dedicated to them.