Samsung Vibrant review (final update: 1/15/2011)

I picked up a Samsung Vibrant the day it became available at T-Mobile.  I have been using it now for about 10 days.  So far, so good.

First, some background.  The Vibrant replaced my G1, which was still working, but was showing its age.  In particular, as apps kept bulking up and becoming more demanding, it was struggling.  And because its memory was so limited, as the apps I needed kept getting bigger, I had to delete other apps.  So I did a hard reset of my G1, connected it to our son's gmail account, took out the SIM card, and gave it to our son to play with.

The Vibrant is at least an order of magnitude improvement over the G1 in almost all respects: battery life, display, internal memory, and speed.  Connection speed also seems hugely improved over the G1, especially over T-Mobile's network here in LA.

Battery life is especially impressive, at least coming from the G1.  I typically wake up, disconnect the charger and take it with me for my hour-long morning run, playing music and with Cardiotrainer using the GPS the entire time, and when I get back, the battery is still nearly full.  On the G1, running with Cardiotrainer and the GPS took the battery down to about 50% or so.  I can generally have the phone with me for the rest of the day with occasional phone calls and app use and there is still a decent charge left when I go to sleep in the evening.  What I have noticed is that the phone is especially thrifty about energy use when it is on but not in use.  If I forget to connect the phone to the charger when I go to sleep, the next morning the battery level is basically what it was when I went to sleep.  Whenever I left the G1 disconnected overnight, by the next morning the battery was down pretty substantially.

Certain apps can be a real battery drain, of course.  Sipdroid appeared to be an energy pig.  Whenever I left that running, the battery drained pretty rapidly.  Accordingly, I leave that turned off.  Running Google Navigate drains the battery quickly, but I can't complain since it is leaving the display on, using voice synthesis, data, and GPS all at the same time.

Performance is a real treat.  Media streaming apps like Radiotime, Pandora and Orb that were basically too demanding for the G1 to run comfortably run beautifully.  One thing I could never make work on the G1, but works fine on the Vibrant, is running Pandora over Wifi, turning Bluetooth on, and streaming the music to the stereo in our bedroom via a Bluetooth music receiver hooked up to that stereo.  On the G1, whenever I tried that, the music was too broken up to be worthwhile.  Also, I can run Cardiotrainer and the Music Player at the same time with no problems.  On the G1, I couldn't listen to music while running Cardiotrainer, it was too broken up and erratic to be worthwhile.

Swype is pretty nice.  I had never used Swype before acquiring the Vibrant, and from the descriptions I had been hearing, I just didn't understand what the deal was.  Finally once I had the Vibrant I started using it, and boy is it nice.  As I get more and more used to it, my speed for text input is picking up, and right now I think I can enter text faster in Swype than I could on a slideout keyboard.  The speed gain associated with Swype is especially apparent for longer words.

For Chinese input, I ended up using the Google Pinyin IME.  It seems to be much improved from the version I was using on the G1.  I also tried out Sogou Pinyin IME, and it worked fine, but I was really creeped out by the long list of access permissions that Sogou Pinyin IME required, including a lot of stuff that I just couldn't imagine was in any way related to the app, like my contact list.

There are some minor annoyances.  The phone doesn't seem to have LED notification lights on the front, so to check for messages, I have to wake up the phone.  Looking at the phone, I could swear that I see three small LEDs on the upper left, but they never seem to come on.  Maybe I'm just imagining them.

At least from T-Mobile, the phone comes with a bunch of apps installed that I doubt I will ever use.  I don't know if they are good or bad, but I'm probably not going to use them.  As far as I can tell, they can't be removed.  The Vibrant has enough memory that these apps don't seem to pose a problem, but nevertheless, I would like to get rid of them.  Oh well.

One other oddity was that when Syncing contacts with gmail, there didn't seem to be any way to specify a particular group of contacts to Sync.  The G1 allowed that, so I could define a group in the gmail contact manager and just sync that to the G1.  With the Vibrant, it seems to be all or nothing: the only choice appears to be to sync everyone in My Contacts.  I went in and cleaned up my contacts in the gmail contact manager so it is manageable now.  One other annoyance with the contact list on the Vibrant is that the column of letters along the right side of the screen that allows jumping to a particular letter in the alphabet is very, very small.  You really need dainty fingers to select any of the letters on the column.  Overall, I think the contact manager could use some work.

There is at least one major annoyance: as has been reported in various forums, there really does seem to be a problem with the GPS.  Hopefully it can be resolved with an update.  About half the time when I turn on GPS, it takes an inordinate amount of time to get a lock on the satellites.  Sometimes I have waited for five minutes with no lock.  This happens in a variety of apps: Google Maps, Cardiotrainer, etc.  Usually once it has a lock, it is fine.  However, the phone has locked up sometimes when the GPS is turned on, like in Google Navigate, or Cardiotrainer, but so far this has only been sporadic.  In at least two cases the phone was completely unresponsive and I ended up popping the battery and replacing it to force a reboot.  Some fixes have been posted that involve hacks that don't seem too onerous, but I will probably wait for an on the air update.

I'll keep updating this as I notice things, so stay tuned.

7 August 2010


One minor annoyance: the Calendar app by default adds events to a calendar called "My Calendar" that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the google account the phone is linked to, and so isn't synced.  So every time I add an event in the Calendar app, I have to manually change the calendar it is being added to.  I found this out because I added a bunch of events that weren't synced to my google account, and then finally I realized that by default they were being added to a calendar on the phone "My Calendar" that had nothing to do with my gmail account.  I edited each event to change the calendar to my google calendar and it synced fine.  I can't find any way of changing the settings on the app to force new events to be added to the synced google calendar by default.  Maybe there is a way, but it isn't obvious.

9/6/2010

The camera interface is pretty clumsy.  The major annoyance is that the default setting is that after taking a picture, it is left there for review, with options for sharing and so forth, with no obvious way to go on and take another picture.  I fumbled around for quite a while before I figured out that the only way I could get it back to be ready to take another picture was to hit the back button.  There wasn't any option on the screen for simply saving the picture being reviewed and moving on to take another.  Another annoyance is that it isn't at all obvious how to bring up the settings menu.  Again, I stumbled on it while getting ready to take a picture, I hit the arrow on the side of the screen and the controls for the settings came up.  When I finally did get in to settings, I was able to dig around and turn off Review so that I could simply take pictures without needing to fumble around with each picture.

12/31/2010

Well, I have had the Vibrant for several months now.  Overall, my impression after having used it for so long is mixed.  The display is beautiful, and when it works, it works very nicely.  But the GPS is still flaky, even with the OTA update that came out a few months ago.  Apps that use the GPS have a nasty habit of working sluggishly and even locking up, something requiring me to open the case and remove and replace the battery to get things going again.  This especially seems to be a problem if I open an app that uses GPS within about five minutes of turning on the phone.  Also the GPS lock still takes an inordinate amount of time.  It is better than it was before the OTA fix, but hardly acceptable.

This leads me to another issue: the phone takes an inordinate amount of time after powering up to actually become usable.  It seems to spend several minutes on power-up scanning the memory, syncing, and who knows what else, during which time the phone is extremely sluggish, and opening an app is difficult.  Opening an app at this time that uses the GPS often seems to crash the app or even freeze the phone.

Honestly, given the continuing problems with the GPS, and the hideously slow boot time, I don't know if I could recommend this phone to anyone.  I would swear that the phone takes longer to boot up and become usable than a Windows machine, which is pretty bad.  And the phone has crashed enough times when I was trying to use Google Maps that I am hesitant to rely on it for anything in the way of navigation.  That said, when the phone is working, it works beautifully.

Meanwhile, we're still waiting for Android 2.2 (Froyo)...  What's the deal with that delay?


1/15/2010


I finally gave up on the Samsung Vibrant.  I gave mine to my wife and bought a G2.  My wife is fine with the Vibrant since she isn't as reliant on her phone as I am for work.  In the end, what turned me against the Vibrant was the ongoing flakiness with the GPS.  It wasn't just that it took so long to get a lock, but also because while it was trying to get a lock, whatever app was using the GPS and indeed the whole became unstable.  I don't know how many times I had to open the case and pop out and replace the battery to reboot the phone after opening up Google Maps, which somehow resulted in the phone locking up when it was seeking a GPS lock.  This was especially frustrating a few times when I was driving and wanted to use Google Maps to locate a store.  I had to pull over and park several times in the space of ten or fifteen minutes to reboot the phone.   

Even when the GPS had a 'lock' on the Samsung Vibrant, it was pretty miserable.  I use Cardiotrainer to track my runs.  When I looked at maps of my runs, I was shown passing through buildings and teleporting back and forth to locations near my route.  By contrast, the G2 shows my path on the same route as a nice, straight line.

More generally, it just seemed like the Samsung Vibrant had a lot of problems with the stability and performance of apps that worked well on my G1 and now work fine on my G2.  For example, Google Reader never ran very well at all on the Samsung Vibrant, but works fine on the G2.  I also had problems with the browser on the Vibrant freezing while it opened pages, requiring me to kill the browser and restart it.

The continued delays with Froyo didn't help.   Perhaps Samsung had its reasons for being slow with Froyo, but their inability to issue the update made me wonder about their commitment to keeping their products up to date.

It is really too bad about the Vibrant.  It is a beautiful phone, and a please to hold, and has a beautiful screen.  The camera was very nice.  But in the end it was simply not up to my needs.  I'll be posting a separate comparison of the G2 and Samsung soon.