Samsung Galaxy S: Hands-on With The T-Mobile Vibrant

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Less than 48 hours after receiving the AT&T Captivate from Samsung, we now have the T-Mobile Vibrant, the second of four Galaxy S Android devices to launch this summer. Like the Captivate, the Vibrant features a beautiful 4-inch Super AMOLED touchscreen, 16GB of onboard memory, Swype, full DLNA support, a 1GHz Hummingbird processor, 5-megapixel camera with HD recording (sans flash) and Samsung’s soon-to-launch Media Hub service. But that’s where the similarities end. Like they’ve done with previous smartphone launches, T-Mobile has included a slew of extras like a copy of James Cameron’s Avatar, MobiTV, the Amazon Kindle app, GoGo, Layar, Slacker and EA’s The Sims 3. (The HTC HD2 comes with Transformers 2 preinstalled.)

To be quite honest, the Vibrant is a bit plasticky and looks exactly like the last generation iPhone. It’s incredibly lightweight, if you’re into that sort of thing, which I’m not but that’s just me. Unlike the AT&T Captivate, T-Mobile allows users to install non-Android Market apps. It’s a bit puzzling as to why AT&T is blocking that feature of Android but T-Mobile isn’t making the same mistake.

A few other things worth noting based on initial impressions are as follows. The home row of icons cannot be modified and consists of the Dialer, Contacts, Messaging and Applications launcher. When connected over USB, the T-Mobile Vibrant’s internal and SD card are not recognized by my Mac. My Mac isn’t rejecting it or anything; it just doesn’t show up at all. The video player doesn’t remember where you left off, so anytime you navigate away from the video you’re watching, you’ll have to restart from the beginning or remember to keep track of where you are before doing so. Modeled after their digital camera line, the camera UI on the Vibrant is more or less what you’d see on a Samsung digital point-and-shoot camera and it even includes a panorama mode.

Anything you’d like to know about the Vibrant, please feel free to leave a comment. We’ll have dueling reviews of the T-Mobile Vibrant and AT&T Captivate in the coming days.

More on Techland:
Android: Samsung Epic 4G to Sprint, Vibrant to T-Mobile, Fascinate to Verizon