[Fascinate General] orateam:
I got the fascinate yesterday and here are my thoughts.

Since i had the vibrant and captivate, this phone wasn't going to be all new to me. Mostly it holds true.

Design - Nearly a clone of the Tmobile Vibrant. In fact,since tmobile gave me 2 covers for the Vibrant, and i forgot to return one, i tried to put it on the Fascinate. Shapewise, it is nearly identical. But the vibrant cover is about an 1/8 of an inch smaller and has that hump on the bottom. Personally i never liked the hump, but thought the rounded corners were the best part of the phone. So i'm good with the design. Personally i found the Samsung Epic from sprint to be too big. In using it over the weekend, it was a brick. Just didn't feel good to me. I never liked the EVO because it just felt a little too big, the same went for the EPIC. I really like the slimness of the Captivate/vibrant/iphone 4/and the fascinate better over the bigger and thicker phones.

Performance - Same as every other galaxy. Ditto for screen quality, quadrant, etc...

SO what makes it different from tmobile. Hotspot and the flash. Hotspot is nice but costs more money and i won't be using it. The flash i "thought" was not needed because the galaxys took such excellent night photos. But i was wrong there. The flash is definitely useful.

I'm starting a new paragraph because i want to talk a little more about this. Phone cameras are typically crappy. It has been reviewed many times that megapixels don't equate to good photos. Most reviews will tell you that the 8mp cameras on the incredible/droid x don't come close to the 5mp cameras on the galaxy or iphone4's. Having used highend cameras on smartphone with flash (EVO, droid 2), i can tell you that with or without a flash, the pictures in the dark were awful. In fact on both of those phones, i would rather not have a flash since it was pointless. Both of those phones gave me incredibly grainy photos in medium to dark lighting. The flash only magnified the grainyness. Now i knew that the Galaxy's took grainless photos in medium lighting, but i had no idea about the dark light photos. Well, lets just say, i was blown away. Nearly Grainless photos in PITCH BLACK. The droid 2 with flash in total darkness is useless, photos are nearly impossible to tell what is happening. You need some light.

I submit two photos. One by the droid2 in the tunnel (fairly dark but backlit) at the Hulk ride at Islands of Adventure last week. The other is with the fascinate of my white bathroom wall with the door close (pitch black room). White helps to see the grain.

software - Yes it's BING. The search button is mapped to Bing search, and bing maps. But you should give it try before knocking it down to the ground. A map is a map. Is google maps probably better, yep. guess what, you can put google maps as an icon on one of you home screens and use it if you like. It's only a matter of time before the search button is remapped by developers anyhow. In the mean time, it brings up bing maps for addresses. no biggie to me. You can still set your navigation to use google navigation, which i did do. As for searching on the web. I made google.com my homepage on my browser, problem fixed. Honestly, i never used the search button before because it didn't whether to search my contacts, browser or what not, so i avoided it. Other than that, it's still a standard 2.1 eclair which works just as it did on the vibrant/captivate.

So to sum it up, a badass phone. Before seeing it with the flash, i wouldn't have made the conscious choice to leave tmobile / ATT just for a flash. I did it for the network. But after seeing the flash, even if Verizon were worse than att/tmobile, i would have still moved to a flash based galaxy.