The Samsung Moment - Three Months of Android Love

Well, hello there boys and girls. After three months of using the Samsung Moment, I believe that it is high time I let all of you know how my experience has been. I want to include everything, and so the layout of this blog will be on each component separately.




Hardware


Screen

The Moment's screen is decent for what I use it for, but does not show most videos that well. I have never been a fan of YouTube, or the myriad videos that one can find there, but you may be different. If that is the case, you may want to get a phone with a greater resolution, and a larger screen. The couple of videos that I did watch were rather choppy, and really indeciperable.

Optical Trackpad

I must unapologetically state that this component is a complete waste of space. I have tried using the trackpad from time to time, but it does not seem to register the fact that my finger has passed over it at all. I can press it to select an item that is highlighted, but, if I am unable to use the trackpad to to highlight an item, then I am unable to highlight an item. I would have preferred a treckball, or even nothing, as I have used the phone with no real issues, and have not missed the trackball.

Hard Buttons

There are a total of five non-keyboard buttons on the Moment. There are the typical Call and End Call buttons, a two-way toggle for controlling sound, a camera button, and a voice activation button. I have no complaints. The End Call button also functions as the Sleep button, and will be the single button that you use the most on this phone. The camera button is useful, and I prefer using it rather than the touchscreen camera button, if only because it is difficult for me to hold the camera still while trying to operate the touchscreen.


Touch Buttons

There are three Touch buttons right below the Moment's screen. They are the Home, Menu, and Back buttons. These have all operated very well for me the whole time that I have owned this phone. The Home button in particular has been of great use to me, as you can long press it in order to bring up a small menu of the last six apps that you have had open.

Camera

The camera on the Moment operates well enough. It isn't anything special, and it takes it a little while to open, but, as I stated above, the Hard button on the side does make for ease of use.

Slideout Keyboard

This component is the Moment's greatest triumph with me. I love the keyboard on my phone. There are a total of fourty-seven keys on this lovely slide-out, and they are all nicely spaced out. While this may not be an issue for everyone who uses smartphones, my fingers are very thick. Most of the time when using a touchscreen, I can not see around my finger to touch the next spot on the phone, but must instead use the hunt an peck method with my touchscreen. The Moment has a full number row, all twenty-six letters, a space bar, an arrow pad, an enter key, a backspace key, a period key, a shift key, a fn key, and a dedicated search key. After a short amount of time getting used to the spacing and placement of keys on my Moment, I have come to love the ease of use with which I can text and write.

GPS

The GPS on the Samsung Moment is somewhat of a disappointment. When I am at home, it always shows my position to be at a location that is almost a mile down the road from me. This Location will change if i stand outside and wait, with my phone held out, for around ten minutes. this makes any location based apps almost unusable. I say almost unusable because the phone will eventually register your location, you just may not want to wait the ten minutes that it takes it to do so. I am hoping that the newest update from Android will help this problem, although it may be the hardware, and not the software.


Software


Operating System

The Moment is currently running on v. 1.5 of Android. The OS works well, and, of course, the integration with Google is fantastic. I am anxiously awaiting the update to 2.1 that is supposed to be coming out in late April, because there are more and more apps that are coming out only on 2.1.

User Interface

Samsung chose not to create their own user interface for the Moment, which is a good thing in my book, but only because I would prefer my display to be simple.

Bloatware

The Moment comes pre-loaded with several undeletable apps compliments of Sprint. These are Nascar, NFL, Sprint Navigation, Moxier exchange, and SprintTV. I have no use for any of these Applications, and would be more than happy if they did not exist.

Onscreen Keyboard

I quickly found that the Moment's onscreen keyboard was just slightly more than useless to me. As I have mentioned earlier, it was impossible for me to use because of my inability to see the screen past my thick fingers. I would recommend to anybody that finds that they need to use the onscreen keyboard for one-handed use to download a T9 input keyboard.

Summary

All in all, I love my phone. I must admit that a large part of what makes me love it is the fact that it is running Android, the use of which has been a pleasure, but the slide-out keyboard has also claimed it's share of my love. Thanks for reading kiddos, see you next time.