So I just received my brand new Samsung Epic on Thursday night, and it's possibly the best phone I've ever used; it blows me away more than the Moto SLVR did, and even more than the Palm Treo Pro and HTC Touch series, all of those phones were amazing, but this is just on another level.I believe a lot of it has to do with the strength of the Android platform. I was initially skeptical because I have a very long history with Hotmail, I've had an active email address there for close to a decade. When I first sampled a different Android phone a few months ago, there were many headaches with linking up to my Hotmail account. I need to use iMAP for Hotmail, and the new Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync for Hotmail seems to open up a lot of doors, but there are still some issues with downloading HTML emails. There are already a few pay apps that allow you to Sync up pretty well, but I'm looking for consolidation and ease of use here, so instead, I slowly migrated over to my Gmail account, and simply used Gmail to pop off of Hotmail's servers. Not the best solution, but a compromise I can live with. To my surprise, making Gmail my primary was a great idea. Google accounts migrate seamlessly into the phone, and really enhance the experience. I already used Google Calendar and Google Maps/Latitude, so it made a lot of sense.
The overall features are just so flawless at the moment. An overall smooth and very reactive touchscreen that isn't too sensitive, a great slide out keyboard, an amazingly crisp screen. The phone seems to run quite fast as well. I did have some problems with it reading my USB card, but the phone actually scans the ENTIRE card for media... a little unexpected, and I may need to move photos to their own dedicated card to combat this, but overall a nice feature, especially when browsing for a photo that you just can't seem to locate. The phone is a tad large, but not as bulky as some previous touch screen/keyboard combos. I'm coming from a Palm Treo Pro, so this phone is a bit bigger, but it feels sleek and light overall, and the size doesn't seem to impact it's portability at all.
As far as the interface goes, the integrated TouchWiz 3.0 works great, and allows for up to 7 customizable home screens. The transitions between them is smooth and fast, and the widgets that can be added are varied. My personal favorites are the Twitter and the Mint.com widgets, although I'm sure there are other great ones out there that I'm not even aware of yet. The Swype texting ability works great, and is the next big evolution on technologies such as iTap/T9.
Overall, I feel as if this is just an overwhelming approval of the Android OS with TouchWiz, after dabbling with it since its initial release, this is the first time that I actually have an overall positive experience with it. Granted, I've only owned it for a few days, but the first impression is the lasting impression, of course. The best features are the ultra responsive, high resolution touch screen, the speed of the hardware, and the light-weight generously sized slide out keyboard. The one major irk thus far is that the system does not allow you to use your camera if it is less than ~20% battery life.
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