[Nexus One General] tanman1975:
So I got the wife the T-Mobile variant of the Galaxy S, T-Mo's latest and greatest Android until next month when the 21 mb/s G1 Blaze comes out.

The T-Mo version on paper is the retarded brother compared to Sprint's version (which has a front camera, hard keyboard and LED flash), but T-Mobile's family plan saves us over $50 per month over going to Sprint (we pay $140/month for unlimited minutes and data for two Android phones), and TMo's HSPA+ is very quick here, in many cases faster than Sprint's 4G.

On to the review...

Good: screen is bigger (4"), but not TOO big. The brighter, multi-touchscreen is a generation ahead of ours and very accurate and responsive. Watching Avatar on it is unreal. Though it does not have the resolution of the iPhone 4, the contrast and vibrance is superior. It makes the N1 and iphone4 look a tad washed out by comparison. Samsung has itself a sick little screen here. It's very thin and light. Comes with an internal 8gb memory so with a 32 gb sd card you're carrying 40 gb of space! Speed of phone appears to be really snappy, due to dedicated video processor. You can definitely see the difference in 3d rendering. The speaker is much nicer than ours. IT has a TV out and a mini usb to HDMI support coming, so you can plug it into a TV and embiggen your screen. The camera and camcorder software is very nice (and quick).

Bad: Tmo's version looks like an iPhone, which is silly (maybe so tmo users can stay but still look trendy in public?). It's made of plastic instead of our elegant metal, and is a fingerprint magnet. It doesn't have an LED flash. Night time indoor shots worked fine in ambient light, but forget about taking pictures in a bar. GPS is spotty, but i understand there's already a fix for that (Fixed. It works fine now) No Froyo yet, but Samsug S version has already been leaked on the interwebs and the phone does come with what appears to be flashlite. Uninstallable bloatware. Big Boo to that. Die in a fire, Slacker and TeleNav GPS... (REALLY, TMo? TELENAV GPS?)

Things that make you go, "Meh":

Samsung's user interface is both a blessing and a curse. They've got some interesting widgets (buddy call, buddy updates), but I miss stock. No LED notifier light (like N1's trackball). However this has been remedied by a third party app that renders a small notifier light on the screen when phone is asleep, but eats up battery. The lack of customization ability to the UI's default buttons is an annoyance, but I have to admit the integration of social services (twitter, facebook, snapfish, kodak etc.) into the contacts is impressive and convenient.

End result:

Tmo did castrate a lot of this phone's capability. I'd love to play with Sprint's Epic, which will have the hard keyboard, LED Flash and front facing camera (no wi-fi required for the equivalent of FacePalm).

Though I have an upgrade available now, I'm sticking with the N1 fdr several reasons. It's a more elegant looking phone and it's "pure." It will still get all of Googles software upgrades way before the other Android phones out there-- I love you Froyo! I use the heck out of the LED flash. Plus we have noise cancellation which is a godsend for me.

Also, if i want to use graphics intensive apps and games, I can always temporarily steal the wifie's phone.

PS.

Ok, her phone does something completely awesome that blew me away. i found out accidentally that it can share videos from itself to our TV over the wireless network. It actually took over the TV and played our HD videos on it without any setup at all. All I had to do was longpress any picture or video in the gallery and share it to TV. Supposedly it can also grab media from other sources on the network and play it on the TV but I haven't tried that yet.

Unfortunately, my efforts to rip the app out and install it on the Nexus One have failed miserably...

For now.