Let me begin this by explaining that for the past 22 months I have owned and thoroughly enjoyed using T-Mobile's G1 phone. It was the first Android phone available, and I loved the variety of features it had. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of leaving it on the charger too long. The battery life grew progressively worse until yesterday, at which point it wouldn't stay on for more than a few minutes. My account was eligible for an upgrade, and I had about $350 to blow, so I settled on buying the Samsung Vibrant.
Best decision ever.
HardwareAll of the major providers in the U.S. carry a variant of the Galaxy S phone, the Vibrant being T-Mobile's. As far as hardware goes they are all very similar. It has a 1 GHz Hummingbird S5PC110 CPU, 512 GB of RAM, the most powerful GPU in any Android phone to date, and most importantly, a 4" super AMOLED touch screen. The picture on this phone is beautiful. I can't stress how crisp the image looks. The interesting thing about it is that it is 20% brighter, 80% less reflective, and uses 20% less battery than a normal screen.The lack of a physical keyboard and trackball took some getting used to, since I owned a G1 previously.
The Vibrant in particular feels extremely light for what it can do. While reading about it, I saw some complaints about battery life, but I haven't had any issues so far. It has a 5 MP camera and can record video in 720p HD. Also it comes with some pretty decent headphones.
SoftwareIf you've used an Android phone before, this won't feel much different. It runs on version 2.1 with Samsung's Touchwiz 3.0 interface. 2.2 should be available later this year. Live wallpapers are cool, but eat up the battery a bit more quickly. It comes with both the standard Android widgets, as well as some widgets by Samsung. A really big feature is the Swype keyboard, which lets you trace a word out instead of typing. It takes some getting used to, but once you get it down it's very efficient (I typed all of this using the Swype keyboard).
The big thing about the Vibrant in particular is the things that are on it. Out of the box it comes with James Cameron's Avatar preloaded onto it (this was great to watch on the 4" screen), as well as an exclusive version of The Sims 3. Some other neat exclusives include a month of free television, online radio, and in-flight internet services.
tl;drGreat phone. Thinking about buying it? Do it. Don't want to buy it? Buy it anyway.
