Well, it seems that Samsung is the first advocates to release a device in the United States where it chooses the Active-Matrix organic LED screen technology with the Samsung Impression.
Now, we first got our hands on preview of it during CTIA with this gorgeous screen. In addition to that, it does supplement AT&T’s line up of Samsung phones that has the TouchWiz interface on it. In addition, it kind of has a lot of similarities with the Eternity which is currently available right now with AT&T. But the new screen technology and also the QWERTY keyboard implementation does make it a little bit of a different device from it.
Now, one of the biggest draw with the Samsung Impression is with its screen technology of the Active-matrix organic LED screen. It does show a lot of colors, you know; really bright screen. It reproduces colors magnificently. And there are a lot of variants—with the colors in any lighting condition, it just looks beautiful and we can’t—you know words or even video can’t really say how well the screen works.
The biggest thing that you want to look at is pure black levels. At times, the color black just really, really matches up with the black border surrounding the screen here and it does blend in pretty well. And when you compare it to other phones, this complete black, you’ll notice that some shades are a little bit lighter but this phone, it definitely shows. And that is what the biggest draw with the Impression.
And the Samsung Impression does have a lot design similarities with the Samsung Eternity. First of all, it uses the slide form factor which we’ve been accustom seeing with most touch screen devices. You know the buttons on the sides are a little bit smaller. We just prefer them to make a little bit larger just because we had a hard time pressing most of them especially the lock and unlock key here.
On the front, we have the buttons, see the hardware buttons, the Send, End and also Back, Clear key. They are pretty large, very easy to touch. The phone is a little bit thicker than the Eternity that is because of the inclusion of the QWERTY keyboard. And the QWERTY itself is a reminiscent of the Samsung layout.
Now, the keys are slightly raised, they are evenly spaced. We had a relatively easy time typing away. The directional keys are right here and also the numbers are highlighted in purple. It does give that snappy feel so we like that. On the back, you have the 3MP camera with the speaker phone. While on the top, you have the proprietary USB charging port. The MicroSD card slots is actually behind the—in the battery bay, all right next to the SIM card slot.
Overall though, the device in terms of design, nothing too flashy, nothing we’ve seen before. A little bit heavier and we’d be afraid to see what would’ve happen if you were to drop this from a large height.
Now, as far as the interface is concerned, it does use the same exact TouchWiz interface found on the Samsung Eternity. We we’re open to see the new version of it. That was first previewed during MWC. But basically, this is the home screen. You have your widgets to the left side. You could pick and choose what would you want to put on the front here. So, you can give that really good personalized look to it.
Now the software is especially swift. We didn’t notice any slow downs and there are a lot of transition effects used throughout the main menus; a lot of switching back to forth. But it’s very swift. It didn’t have really too much of an issue with running the software.
And as far as the typing, the messaging concerned, when you do send a new message, you have a bunch of different options from the keypad to even something like the hand writing recognitions tool. It could recognize what you’re typing on the screen. You could tilt it to the left. Get your full QWERTY keyboard which does a great job of typing away. And now, just like the regular QWERTY, we had no problems with this virtual one; very, very accurate. And of course, you do have that option, if you choose to use the QWERTY.
A web browsing experience is tolerable on the Samsung Impression. It does render pages pretty well but it’s not as smooth as some of the premier web browsers out there but it does get the job done. You could zoom in various ways. You just click the zoom in, zoom out. Unfortunately, there is no page overview, so really can’t get a full grasp of what the whole page looks like. You had to just scroll to your location. So, there is going to be a lot of vertical and horizontal scrolling involved with it. But it’s very easy to use, very simple. Unfortunately, it does not do flash animation. But like we said, it’s just a basic web browser. No problems with it at all.
Overall, the Samsung Impression does a great job of being in a well balanced touch screen device. We do know, you do have the new screen technology. On top of that, it does have a lot of different options for input methods. We like the design. It’s very well made. It feels pretty good in the hand. And we are pleased with the Active-matrix organic LED screen technology that they used. And it truly does shine. One of the biggest parts of the phone, actually.
On top of that, you have a device that runs pretty swift. The software is great, very simple, a lot of different personalization with the TouchWiz interface. But if you currently have the Eternity or any variant form of the TouchWiz interface such as the Behold or even the Omnia, this may not be a truly worthy replacement for that. But other than that, it’s a great device overall.
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